I wrote a simple ray tracer for a college project in the 90s so I would tend to say that part of the novelty is that it's actually quite easy to write a very basic ray tracer and get cool looking images :)
Even a single triangle is harder than a sphere, but with a triangle mesh you can't avoid thinking about acceleration structures and having a watertight intersection test, which includes worrying about floating point precision issues.
So what you're saying may be less about raytracing vs. rasterization and more about spheres vs. triangles.