I know but, still many don't see how this generation has improved over the best games of last generation, however I reckon after what we've seen this week, it's definitive evidence.

Not all improvements to visuals increase the workload of artists, some graphics techniques actually do the complete opposite... And speed up the process.

I think we are starting to see more games leverage Photogrammetry and Global Illumination now, which has been fantastic. (Halo, Battlefront. etc'.)

As for the price... Well. Publishers are bloody greedy, let's leave it at that. - They aren't going broke or struggling financially that's for sure.

I get your point, but to have photo-realistic graphics we need artists that can make photo-realistic textures for human faces, as well as other complicated creatures. So you need a group of artists that can both paint at a photo-realistic level, and paint in the freaky skewed way that an unwrap requires. And the texture being created for a photo-realistic model needs to not only be that great, but it needs to be able to handle whatever animation is thrown on the final model as well. And to boot, it needs to look good from all possible angles. 

The only way I can think of to surpass this hurdle is to have some computer program take ten thousand pictures of an actor's face, and then somehow merge them into the ultimate texture. But just getting 3DS Max to do a good unwrap of a complicated model on it's own is damned near impossible. A human always has to step in. So my hopes for such tech are not very high. 

Those are all just bells and whistles though. Nothing revolutionary. Sub-Surface Scattering hardly makes a difference unless you are modeling something that is semi-translucent, like the mucous membranes around an alien creature's jaws. I can't tell the difference between AF and No AF, unless I specifically look for it where a texture starts to tile on the floor. Lighting is nice, but you can still get really good looking scenes by baking the lighting in beforehand. There was definitely a huge leap from PS3 to PS4 in the lighting department when it came to open world games. That's because a moving sun makes baked lighting impractical. But lighting is only one thing out of several things that make up a scene.

If you know what you're doing, and know the limitations of your system, you can make things look really great. Did you know that the environmental geometry in Dead Space is so low poly you could run it on a PS2? It only looks so good because of the fantastic texture work. 

Here's a two minute video showing the difference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKHfOfojF8w Without Ray-Tracing and SSS you can see that the light doesn't go through the alien guy's ears very realistically. With it the light goes through the ears. And that's pretty much the only difference it makes at all. Under the right lighting conditions, with the right environment, you could get some pretty neat results with this. For example; you could have a tropical forest with rays of strong sunlight shining realistically through thousands of SSS'd leaves in the jungle canopy. But not all games are going to use the perfect location for highlighting that type of graphics effect.