Not my field, but my impression is optical system design is a very rich high-dimensional space. And thus that suggestions of hard limitation are often overlook

Not my field, but my impression is optical system design is a very rich high-dimensional space. And thus that suggestions of hard limitation are often overlooking possibilities. For example, resolutions in angle, time, color, and intensity can be traded, inhomogeneously, and augmented with computation. It's not that simple hard limits, say Rayleigh's diffraction limit on resolution, are wrong exactly. But they do seem to get naively misapplied as system limitations. Super-resolution microscopy techniques, for example, work around it.