How long until the Render Engine Singularity?

Jonstark

I'm a Carrara user (among other softwares, but so far Carrara is my fav) and while I do find myself complaining a bit about the few bugs I encounter and speculate on what features need to be added in Carrara 9 (ahem, dynamic cloth!), it occurred to me that on the plus side, there really isn't that much missing from it, and there isn't all that much left to do/add.

It occurred to me though that nearly all digital rendering apps (unless they are dead and no longer supported by anyone) are all moving in the same direction, and technology is moving forward rapidly. Carrara is an all-in-one app, you can model in it, texture in it, uv-map, rig with bones, pose, generate landscapes and skies, generate hair, use physics and particles, animate, render, etc. And many other apps already are all-in-one (Shade, Modo, etc) and more and more apps are heading in that direction, which makes sense because after all why model in X program, export it to Y program to rig, export it to Z program to animate, and send it to another program to render, etc....

With that said, i got to wondering about where it's all heading, and what things will look like 5 or 10 years from now. What will Poser 18 look like, for example or Studio 14? Will every single digital rendering app have every possible feature and tool that exists, and the only differences will be in price and how comfortable the user is with the User Interface? Is it possible that we hit some wall in the future where there are no more features that Devs can think to add, no more bugs to crush, and if so what will happen at that point? Imagine that every digital rendering app includes full and flawless integration with every other possible digital rendering app, they all include a biased and unbiased rendering engine (that renders even the most complex scenes in less than an eyeblink), has every possible animation feature and tool, every possible animation feature and tool, every possible modelling and rigging feature and tool...

Do you think that's where things are headed? And if so, what will software developers do to get us to continue to upgrade at that point? :) Or maybe they'll start moving to a 'yearly fee to use license' model instead of a 'purchase this upgrade and get to use this license for the app forever'?

I guess I'm just speculating about what we're heading for, as I've already seen - in just a few short years - a lot of growth and development of software. Anyone wonder what's coming?