[hwillis]

If you wanted to show someone a walkaround of the Sistine chapel or David, would you be better off using triangles and PBR and raycast lighting? You don't really gain anything from all that; you're doing a tremendous amount of computation just to recapture the particular lighting at an exact time. If you want the same detail that a few good pictures capture -tens of millions of pixels- you need to have many billions of triangles onscreen.

With splats you can have incredibly high fidelity with identical lighting and detail built in already. If you want to make a game or a movie, don't use splats. If you want to recreate a static scene from pictures, splats work very well.