Gamedev is still full of clever people pushing graphics cards to their limits. The kinds of tricks are different nowadays, as most of the work is done on the GPU, and the important thing is to keep it busy with highly parallel, branchless code with good memory locality.
My point is being embarrassingly parallel over being efficient and smart isn't actually being clever, hence why the phrase is "embarrasingly parallel." That said, I often need get work done (publish papers) so I opt to do that over being more clever in my code.
I sort of looked up to gamedevs because they seem to accomplish a good experience without having to model everything, and its an attitude I've fantasized about bringing to my work. It sounds however like they are moving in our direction which is disappointing I guess.
