Sure, and it would be nice to raytrace everything and have self evolving neural networks for AI and etc. But there’s just not a way to do everything all at once in anything close to a practical manner. Better translucency shading is doable, UE4 would benefit overall if it switched from spherical harmonics to spherical guassians, which could improve everything from lightmap quality to the transparency probe angular resolution.
Right now the next version of UE4 will be concentrating on performance. Probably because UE4 isn’t the fastest for a lot of things and that a lot of big titles on the unfortunately a bit slow Xbox One are using it. Maybe after the next release though there’ll be work on all those other requests.