and there are plenty of hard questions about it -- gardens of
eden, maximal stable densities, minimal quadratic replicators, Turing
completeness, etc etc. None of them are trivial, though some are
answered (it's Turing complete), and I don't think anyone seriously
studying it thinks that the answers will tend to fall out of the rules
in any simple way.
Exactly, no-one _seriously_ studying it thinks the answers will tend to
fall out of the rules (or be derivable from any computational method
other than playing it out) ;-)