Cherry-picked a few images and Juxtaposed them: https://academy-vwg-odt-compare-images.netlify.app/
These are really interesting.
I feel the frame of the CG woman’s face looks far less ‘cinematic’ through the ‘naive DRT’, yet provides a clearer view of what’s actually going on with the asset. More true to ‘the eye’ than ‘the camera’. This feels like a win for surfacing and look-dev, where creating a robust and versatile asset is the goal, but a loss for Lighting and Comp, where ‘make my movie look like a movie’ is the unsaid note hiding under everything.
The explosion on the other hand feels far less realistic to me (take that for what it’s worth, my real world exposure to explosions is pretty limited). My assumption here is that the look was developed in a way that takes advantage of the existing RRT/ODT to give the illusion of additional colour complexity. (Would need some real world unclipped explosion frames to really know here, which are hard to come by)
Once you get to the live action stuff, I feel like the ‘naive DRT’ is generally less attractive across the board. Hurting the ‘looks good out of the box’ angle, but helping the ‘allow the LMT to do the work’ angle.