There was a purpose to my pedantry.
I'm trying to make a philosophical point here, over and above the image processing aspects, not to distract from what is a beautifully executed animation.
I understand that this is an exercise in rendering images, and there are good reasons we seek this sort of hyper-realism, it makes our visual communication more effective. However, when we forget what we are communicating and get lost in the mechanics of how we communicate it, we can really lose our way.
You know, it's a sort of "the operation was a success but the patient died" kind of issue.