It's not a lack of engineering, but a lack of time, no? 5 years later and Cyberpunk runs on the Switch 2, MacBook Air and Linux Gaming Handhelds. While also scaling beautifully to 64 core CPUs or $3000 Nvidia raytracing GPUs.
The union is interested in keeping the union afloat. If the union sees no other opportunity it can become interested in keeping the company float, but you have not made the case for your statement to be a truism.
Consider an actors union — actor unions have famously walked away from companies without much regard for the longevity of the company they walked away from on numerous occasions. They know in that line of work there is always another company looking to hire them, so there isn't a whole lot of incentive to care about individual companies.
It does happen just like bloated management also makes a company less flexible even though managers don't want the company to fail.
They wouldn't intentionally push it to fail, but they could easily push it very close to failing and then something else pushes it over the edge, happens time and time again.
I was under the impression that in recent times unions had been mostly disbanded, with any remaining being in government that can't fail like a business can. You might have a fair point that we've started seeing a return of them in the last few years (article being an example of such), but it seems much too soon to see them rise up to have the power spoken of in this thread. That only happens as the union becomes more and more comfortable pushing back.
Am I misinformed — that unions have actually been popular in the private sector over the past long while in order to trigger what you speak of recently?
No no, NFTs were ridiculously stupid, that's why it was so controversial, that's why there was so much backlash.
Tan having been bullish on NFTs is a very good indicator that he isn't hyping $TRENDING_THING based on technological merit
Not disagreeing that usage in large productions is something that Blender isn't really designed for, but I don't think that it's for a lack of Python API features (if a studio wants something specific it could just maintain an internal fork) or the ever changing Python API surface (the versions aren't upgraded during a production anyways)
What Blender achieved is that lots of university programmes have started teaching Blender or becoming 'tool agnostic'. Studios have also started diversifying their pipelines (this coincidences with studios adopting Unreal and increasing usage of Houdini).
So while Maya is currently the standard, I don't believe that it's growing.
It'll probably be around still in 20 years, with lots of studios having built their pipelines and tooling around it, with lots of people being trained in it, and because it's at the moment still better than Blender in some aspects like rigging and animation (afaik).
I know you're looking for something more universal, but in modern video workflows you'd apply a chain of color transformations on top the final composited image to compensate the display you're working with.
So I guess try separating your compensations from the original work and create a workflow that automatically applies them
