I think you've hit on the key relevance of path tracing (and similar advances). It's not that it necessarily brings a huge improvement over the current state of

I think you've hit on the key relevance of path tracing (and similar advances). It's not that it necessarily brings a huge improvement over the current state of the art when comparing a hand-tweaked "Hero Scene." Skilled game artists can already tune such a scene to look amazing anyway. The difference is things like path tracing can offer similar fidelity without specific artist labor.