Quality 3d animation software is available to anyone with Blender. If someone gets this renderer working as an addon (which will obviously happen) artist will get a side by side comparison of what their work looks like with both cycles and a professional studio product, for free.
This is win, win, win for Blender, OSS and the community.
This. Pixar’s Renderman has been an “option” for a while. It was out of band though. The cycles team will look at the theory behind what’s going on in renderers like this and will make the tech work inside cycles. Maybe someone will port this as another render option but really the sauce is their lighting models and parallel vectorization which could improve cycles already abysmally slow render times.
This is win, win, win for Blender, OSS and the community.