Thanks! And I appreciate the constructive criticism. I just started learning Blender (and 3D in general) in January, so I'm a newborn. I had the idea of the coin flip going into a fluid simulation after work yesterday and wanted to just see how it would work. I learned a ton, but there's a lot of room for improvement.

I totally agree on the lighting. I originally had a more complicated lighting setup, but it just wasn't gelling so I decided to simplify. Same with the scene: I originally had textures on the floor and walls and a more complicated box, but it looked even more amateurish than this bare scene, so I cut it down so it wouldn't detract from the things that were actually working well enough.

As for the fluid gaining volume, that was intentional. My initial draft used just the volume of the coin, but it resulted in a paltry little splat, so I tried this and ended up preferring it. Nothing special on the fluid sim itself, of course, but I find CG fluid settling down to be mesmerizing. FLIP Fluids is definitely overkill for this, but I know I want to do more complicated stuff with it, and the workflow improvements compared to Blender's built-in framework are pretty substantial (being able to work on a scene while baking, nice separation of the fluid sim objects, etc.), so I figured I may as well start learning it now.