Anybody knows how other companies like universal's animation department (ice age, despicable me, ...) stand technology-wise? From the visuals, i always assumed pixar is setting the standards but now knowing that they just start to use unified raytracing, the gap might not be that big...
Why does it matter that much what technology is in the backend? You lead the industry with results, not with the means to get to those results. If I can make my webapp better (however you define "better") than my competitors' using PHP and MySQL, while they're making theirs using Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, etc,etc. Does the tech stack in the background matter, aside from making a nice article?
There's the obvious render time, but actually render time isn't that important - studios are happy to wait up to 30 hours for a 4k frame on the farm if that's what it takes for a shot. But they don't want artists waiting around, so they want very quick iterations and previews of what the artists are doing, as it's the artists who cost money.
This is why global illumination has taken off over the last 5/6 years (thanks largely to SPI and Bluesky showing it could be done), as although the render times are slower, it means lighting the scene (by phyiscally-based shading) is much quicker and you don't need as many hacks as you did with PRMan (light maps, shadow maps, reflection maps, point caches, etc). You can literally model scenes with lights as they are in the real world.
On top of this, there's how easy it is to do very complex shots and change just bits of it - tools like Katana allow hugely complex scenes to be managed and rendered very efficiently, with very little work from artists. Studios who don't have similar tools often duplicate and waste a lot of time doing things that should be easy.
For example, Weta on IronMan 3 wasted a lot of time doing all the different suits, as they didn't have a decent asset-based pipeline that would have allowed them to re-use a lot of shaders, assets for each suit.