Of course, next is Houdini :)

what a machine

Totally. Particularly if you start with "ah, no, that's not possible. Not gonna happen". Then you solve the problem in half the time you thought you needed to fix it.

Discreet!

Just letting you know I migrated from Z to Y in the past couple years. 😀

I've also built a PDG setup that exports a series of animated models to Blender, applies some premade materials and textures to them and exports them in GLTF format.
Unfortunately Houdini does not support exporting GLTF with textures so that helped me a lot.

Benefits include:
Free deployment of Blender on as many nodes as needed.
Deadline submission of Blender tasks directly from Houdini.
Taking advantage of Blender's compositing nodes - when needed (Blender has some nice comp nodes, but hey, Copernicus?)
No need for extra licenses!

when i was a kid i had a vhs of his Munchausen movie, i watched it a hundred times.
I have seen few others but that one in particular is a visual masterpiece in my opinion. There is a video on youtube showing what his technique was.
Low budget creativity at its best.

Watching it now, interesting ones.
Have you ever seen Karel Zeman movies?

or, another one (unrelated to data export)
first frame
load data
render frame
change camera
render other frame
unload
next frame.

what i'm thinking of is
first frame
load data
export geometry data for that frame
don't unload the ram
render the frame preview of that same data (opengl)
unload the data
load the next frame

I usually go step by step, using the viewport for lookdev but then periodically render 1 every 10 frames that I feed into my comp to check if everything is ok. I am still relying heavily on Redshift for my jobs, for now using Karma only for personal projects.