[adrianm]

I thought you were going to go with a different angle on this. If all you care about is photorealism, well, we'll have to agree to disagree that the current state of the art is incapable of that (given enough time).

What I thought your original point was is that 3D rendering ONLY cares about photorealism. Physically based renderers have been greatly influenced by photography (both still and film). Think light probes, camera lenses, etc. Much of the post-processing you see in a scene is also derived by what a camera would see, from focusing, to blur, to HDR now, and of course the infamous lens flare!

So I think a physically based renderer which uses the human eye as its camera would be interesting to see more of.