AFAIK other NeRF methods don't let you use HDR data, just LDR images, so you would have to pre-process your HDR photos (tone-mapping) and you wouldn't be able t

AFAIK other NeRF methods don't let you use HDR data, just LDR images, so you would have to pre-process your HDR photos (tone-mapping) and you wouldn't be able to control exposure afterwards as previous necessary information for doing so would not be present when inferring novel views. HDR-NeRF allows you to control both exposure and position when synthetizing new images. Your intuition is on the point though, with enough data/compute you could build a method that uses the photos with full dynamic range information from a HDR camera instead of "stitching" LDR photos of varying exposures like this method does.