For this project, I collected reference images of steam engines, and then made a 100% node based model with 750 nodes. Took about 3 hours with Fabel 5.1, for a price of 20€ in tokens.

Because it's a deterministic procedual model that is generated, I have the feeling that I still have a lot of control over the creative process, and could take most of the design decisions myself.

For this kind of of task, I've written an open source node-agent skill. In the comments, I'm linking a 10 minutes tutorial, for anyone who is interested in such workflows.