I've been thinking about the same concept, and trying to find a way to introduce analog computing as something that goes together with the story in the game. Analog computing was historically used to solve differential equations, and differential equations can describe most of physics, so one idea was to make a "history of scientific modelling" as a game, where you take the role of say, Newton, and try to find an equation of some orbital motion, given a table of observations.

I'm also building a circuit simulator (stuck on that for a while, tbh), although not necessarily simulating electronic analog computers, but rather the computational principles that could also be applied to mechanical circuits, or just numerical computation.

As for abstraction, I really like the approach of Pure Data, you can group some nodes into more abstract ones.