>> manual ZJ with the inline-six is essentially just a more comfortable XJ with a few more electrical gremlins to worry about, and in many ways, that makes it—at least in my eyes—the holy grail.

You haven’t answered my question. I asked what was technically new about the animation and you replied by throwing out a bunch of product names. I know Pixar uses Renderman. I know what Maya is; there was a time when I was a reasonably seasoned Alias Poweranimator user, and I interned at Wavefront.

What is new, technically speaking? It’s beautifully animated but I don’t necessarily see anything technically groundbreaking.

Saw it too. While I don’t think I found it as objectionable as you, I was puzzled by the oft repeated characterization of ‘masterpiece’. It’s certainly not completely terrible IMHO.. but really not that good, either.

// A Bugeye Sprite just wants to love you.

You’ve nailed the fundamental issue- nobody will want to buy a VR headset for just one AAA game and no promise of anything else on the horizon. Honestly, Valve should approach this like a console release, and have 8-10 solid titles waiting in the wings to support the release.  That's the only way you're going to drum…

Can’t stop won't stop

That’s about as close as you can get to living in Yosemite without being a national parks employee/ranger

For better or worse, Musk has brass balls to try a stunt like that, even if it wasn't a smashing success

// “I do zero market research whatsoever.”

Ah, so actually, YOU were looking for an opportunity to remind everyone you went to Stanford

I dunno, that’s kinda rude to the luggage... at least luggage is useful

Solution is simple: install Titanfall 2 and be sated.

I’m sure it was debated by the dev team, but my guess is that they lost the arms because they covered too much screen real estate, especially when you extend your arms deeper into z space.  Makes seeing important material in the environment much trickier.

In fact, there’s a LOT of people that can afford leases on these

You’re conflating ‘flashy’ with ‘common.’  They don’t necessarily have to be mutually exclusive.

well, i guess ‘street legal’ wasn’t explicitly mentioned, so there you are

This is because most people (Americans, at least) have terrible taste in automobiles.  Sigh

Hat tip to you for an extremely underrated comment