That said, physically-based shading is massively easier to art-direct, even if the "front end" as it were of the renderer isn't naively tracing rays from the camera. There's a killer set of slides and notes documenting ILM and Sony's switch to PBR here: http://renderwonk.com/publications/s2010-shading-course/

Care to elaborate why you think this is the case?

Even when doing raytracing, the fastest way to do the first pass is to rasterize your triangles and output hit data to textures (similarly to deferred rendering).

Additionally, triangle rasterizerization can be used for vector graphics, etc while raytracing is inherently only for 3d content.

I think that in the future we will have some kind of hardware acceleration for raytracing along with traditional triangle rasterization and they will be used together.

Its been a while (~15 years or so) since I looked very deeply into this, but at that time I thought that radiosity was notably superior to raytracing for indirect lighting, and everyone and their cousin seemed to be doing hybrid ray tracing/radiosity systems for realistic rendering.

This covers about 100 different algorithms. Pick one.