Excellent!
All that detail is based on cheating, in one form or another
Too true, and which touches on something else skilled animators know...what they *don't* have to do :-)
Also, in Walking with Dinosaurs, it looked to me like most of the backgrounds were "plates," or actual filmed locations onto which the 3D stuff (including shadows, kicked-up dust, etc) was composited. If they weren't, they were the best artificial landscapes I've ever seen.