Hmm Fractint's not TOO old, dates to about 1988 :-)
Standards don't change. Even when they do, they're just extensions, not revamps. I'm sure the author of the formula parser is proud that his wheel is still rolling under this rickety bandwagon and half a dozen imitations that don't support as many types of fractals or as many methods of rendering them. (Parody is high praise, or at least praise from someone who is high.) I think I've seen requests for identifying calculations that hav a constant result throughout the image, but I'm pretty sure that an optimizing parser could identify such. Speaking of optimizations, I've found at least two images that need close inspection for you to notice that they are _not_ in fact symmetric. They show an inverse kind of symmetry. http://ecn.ab.ca/~brewhaha/img/cards/heart.htm http://ecn.ab.ca/~brewhaha/img/cards/diamond.htm (each is over 700k, but they're also 2100 pixels square, which is pretty good for printing). You'll notice that the luminance component (outside=atan, colors=@altern.map) actually has an embossed appearance where the right and left sides are each dark where the other is light and vice-versa. If you are interested in how to combine different views of one fractal in truecolour, then you might find http://ecn.ab.ca/~brewhaha/img/cards/par.gz to be interesting. I'm not as interested in doing that automatically as I was, because I've found that the interface might be complicated. Recently, I composed a fractal that looks like a guitar with the imaginary view of the fractal being the chrominance and the arctangent view being the luminance. In another, I equalized the chrominance view through a mask. So, it's hard to beat FracTint combined with a good pixel editor.