I would love to see someone like Digital Foundry deep dive into complex animation & interaction systems.
Whenever a typical game graphics discussion comes up I always favor the games that push the benchmark in that category.
The reason being that it is the most broad and cross-discipline heavy challenge in gaming. It combines A.I, physics, environmental conditions, game design and rendering.
The ray-traced GI in Metro Exodus is great but it's an achievement that has a lot to thank Nvidia R&D for and the extra iron in your gaming box. A single rendering developer or two probably came up with that GI solution in a reasonable amount of time. And similarly it could be easily implemented in other games and the switch can be flipped.
But when you compare that to the animation system in i.e. Assassin's Creed it is a very small effort as that animation system likely involved dozens, maybe hundreds of people and years of research on the developers part as it involves all aspect of the game. Due to that reason the implementation cannot simply be exported/imported/quickly-re-created either as it needs to be tailored for the particular game.
