If you can do a second draft with 10 times less code, then at least 90% of the first draft's complexity was accidental. By definition, so to speak. The question of avoiding that accidental complexity at the first try is a separate question.
The VPRI did find particular abstractions, embodied in their various Domain Specific Languages. Implicit parallelism (not concurrency) was tested in one of their languages (Nile), for 2.5 drawing. The problem was embarrassingly parallel to begin with, but they only had to modify the runtime to parallelize it (30 times faster with 40 cores). I also believe they have some form of implicit concurrency.
Also, it doesn't matter if they didn't invent some new ground-breaking abstraction. Because they just showed that applying the right old ideas in a systematic ways can have a tremendous effect. Now the industry just have to wake up.