Making the application wait extremely long or even crash by importing _something_ is a bug in my understanding. Why shouldn't it be fixed? Why shouldn't developers improve performance and blog about it, so other devs learn from it?
It's not about the Moana scene, that's just the test case, so OP has a valid benchmark with human comprehensible durations. The scene could be anything that is smaller and it will be imported faster now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32191173
>At some point, the little pieces need to be assembled, reviewed and finally rendered. Why wouldn't you do that with the DCC application rather than with specialized, limited tools?
It is impossible to hold a typical VFX scene in RAM to start with.
Even freelancers doing sim/FX work now have at least 128GB RAM and this is often just enough for proxy work that still gets expanded at render time.
I.e. consider the possibility that your worst estimate of how complex this data could be is off by 1-3 orders of magnitude.
And for your example: the person who signs this off is the VFX supervisor. They don't sign off anything but final frames.
My understanding is, that you need to reproduce the rendering bug which crashes blender to be able to fix it. And being able to reproduce it, needs to be fast. Even if you have a smaller scene which would trigger this bug, without the optimisations it would take a lot of important time in the feedback loop. Now you have a workflow which crashes the rendering in less than 2 minutes.