All good points. One point you touched on that I'd like to highlight and tie back to your earlier point about removing information is that traditional cameras a

All good points. One point you touched on that I'd like to highlight and tie back to your earlier point about removing information is that traditional cameras are bending light rays along paths that smaller phone lenses simply can't, and then they trivially record the information about how light behaved in that moment. To simulate this given only a 2D projection of some light at a certain point means trying to reconstruct the scene and apply (probably flawed, and certainly imprecise) physical models of how we understand light to behave, and then try to guess how different the image would have turned out in the presence of a theoretical lens affecting the incoming rays. In other words, there IS missing information, a LOT of it. And approximating that information to any degree of accuracy after the fact is intractable, if not impossible. So the fact that we can train a machine to generate a result this believable is just...unfathomably amazing. A human brain, with it's inherent understanding of how the physical world behaves, really is the only other thing that could feasibly accomplish a remotely similar task.