To be honest with you, I understand the reluctance because I've thought about it too. If a game was to use light as a core gameplay mechanic, it would most probably have to be built around that. Which would not be easy... but would also be the point.

Think about it this way. Remember when raytracing itself was forced and fake and unnecessary to the point of being almost funny? I recall all those driving games in the early 2000s that used bitmap tricks in order to show that "the sky was reflected on the windshields of cars", which of course it wasn't. But it was SO funny that devs and marketing of the time thought we'd be awed by that. And - make no mistake - despite it being totally fake, *some* gamers were impressed by it, no?

It was obviously the novelty of the thing. It's not that they did not know or understand that it was a visual gimmick, they liked it because it was something that they did not have before.

This was and is true about lots of things in the gaming world. Novelty sells just for the sake of it for a while. But if it gets enough people's attention, and there's some potential somewhere in there, then creators start experimenting with these things to take them one step further... and before you know it there's a new technique called environmental mapping that's now not just for sky and clouds on windshields but for everything on anything reflective or shiny. From those laughable fake bitmaps to fake reflections to semi-fake "baked" lighting to real lighting, that was more or less the path followed, right?

So it all comes down to experimentation. Doing stuff that has not been attempted before, something novel. Sure, some attempts on RT-based gameplay will be gimmicky to say the least. But then one person will come across one of those gimmicks and think "wait a minute, if I do this instead of that and add this on top, it could be something interesting".

And it will be and then we'll have something we did not have before... and that is why I personally will never stop asking for new stuff instead of just better stuff: the genuinely new stuff pushes things forward instead of dragging things along.