Ok, interesting to hear your perspective. You are a Foundry developer though, right? I'd have to give the Isotropix guys the opportunity to make their case as well.
Of course, and they'd rightly say that Clarisse is useful out-of-the-box, whilst Katana most definitely isn't - you need a renderer, it needs a lot of pipeline work to integrate it with your asset management system, and it needs a lot of customisation to make it "nice" for artists to use.
Out of the box, I wouldn't even class Katana as a good look-dev tool, as the default light manipulators are pretty poor - most studios generally customise them and make their own versions for artists. But that comes back to my original point (which I deviated from quite a bit), which is Katana is more a toolbox with very impressive (but not perfect by any means, there are issues with it) infrastructure capabilities, that VFX studios can build on to fit into their lighting and rendering pipeline.
