Hi Liam,
It is worth to mention that almost all student movies I see from 3D Schools do not have a DI/grading “stage”. You must know that there is one in all budgeted productions (short, indie feature films to higher budgeted productions).
What you are “judging” is the out-of-the-box ACES image processing result.
Not to mention that what you are working with, I assume, is a linear scene referred HDR EXR, while in many productions work with log footage/workflow.
“In production”, the workflow would be log-based. It is not impossible to grade linear footage or renders but “unfriendly” and log is the “common workflow”.
I would also add that what is missing in several DCCs is “OCIO looks” as part of the OCIO implementation. It would be practical if more DCCs would support it and would allow you to “add your own look”. This post might interest you.
ACES (cg in our case) is wide gamut but also OOG (out of gamut). You will still have to potentially deal with OOG images because of its “design”.
I tend to believe that we should not be working with a “dangerous” rendering/working space such as ACEScg. It is unfortunate that it goes OOG.
For instance: I do not think many are aware that their color picker becomes ACEScg color managed when they use ACES. Some may potentially pushing saturation in their color picker to high values as when they are used to when using the sRGB native standard management of their DCC (generally speaking), and on potentially improperly (or un)-calibrated display devices like you mentioned.
This increases the risk of students (and similar individuals) of having non-plausible, out of gamut and unrealistic values (shading, lighting…).
Regarding the mentioned multi-nationals, ACES should not be the only reason to make them care more about color management.
As Chris.B often says, “with great power comes great responsibility”. I would also add that ACES is not obligatory to produce beautiful images (and not for everyone either). But if it is being considered, the whole color and imaging process has to be taking care, meticulously. Plausible values, gamut mapping and compression, tone-mapping, scene referred color processing (tools and manipulation), etc, are important during the whole image creation process.