I continued working on it; just a single spawn point with no interesting interaction made it seem like a rather generic, almost repetitive sim. So I added WASD to move the spawn point around, then I added click-to-disrupt mechanics to introduce some more interesting, unpredictable, visually interesting patterns.
It took multiple iterations of various input-handling systems to settle on a final, simple but (mostly) reliable input system that should be fairly easy to extend in the future without using external libraries.