Forward path tracing with direct lighting only has been done for 'years' (about 4-5 years). Pure forward path tracing without caching of secondary illumination is being done now, but at great expense of render time and artist time to deal with the inevitable noise.

It is something that people are getting to work in the end but it is a consistently painful disaster.

So basically forward path tracing is not adequate. That doesn't mean it can't be forced to work through huge render farms, hacks, compositor painting and who knows what else.

I agree it's possible to do better than forward path tracing, but a big part of why nearly everyone switched to it was that it significantly reduces artist time, is a lot less painful and requires fewer hacks than the methods used before it.

The state of the art keeps improving but I've never heard any call the switch to forward path tracing a painful disaster, quite the opposite.

Few hacks yes, less painful I have to disagree with. It is the present and of course the future, but what I have seen is that the hacks shift to do anything possible to reduce noise, and the artist's time shifts to doing whatever they can do deal with noise. It never ends up being 'fire and forget' because renders end up either overkill on cpu time or with noise somewhere in the image.

Forward raytracing as it currently stands is awful to use at the moment on a large scale for final motioned blurred images that can be sold to a client, but because it is simpler it is still better than alternatives. That is because getting the same results out of (REYES) renderman was something left to a handful of gurus and fanatics.

Now we have a state where renders take 8 hours per frame per character per pass but people still like it better. So be it, but that is still very painful.