My impression is rather it hit a nerve with a certain group of people who easily get all excited, exclaiming ‘this tech does it all super fast, we need it in Blender!’.
Well that is the whole point, to get it “super fast”, or what do you want ? Without top edge rendering we would be still in the rendering middle ages.
Let me recall who started the overhyped discussion on that Specular Manifold Sampling paper?
Dude, what is the matter with you ? Aside from the fact that those posts are in themselves important, take it or leave it, you dont have to read them. Or do you like it stalking trough posts ? And BTW Manifold Sampling is in other renderers like PRman already used. Devs are not gods all the time, they need input. I recently helped a dev to get into the right direction with some CUDA stuff. Of course it is our right to say things here. This is not hype, its efficiency, because, you know… i dont know about you, but for me time is money.
The amount of people in the community who do any animation at all is rather limited, by comparison, let alone ‘hardcore animation’ (what does that term even refer to?).
Youre kidding, right ? The “community” makes now feature films from Netflix to Hollywood pipelines already in small to midsize companies. And now even bigger companies begin to have Blender pipes. I recommend checking what the Blender “community” is now. “Blender is only for the small artist” is a thing of the past.