@Lesuge There is a misconception on what is being doing on the current engine progress. There were different approaches and “states” for the realtime raytracing, the first time they showed it live to the public was the Star Wars demo, which required an absurd hardware (already obsolete), but it was an internal project and worked with a non-released experimental engine code. I am sure any company wanting to have access to that specific code would have cut a deal with Epic for this. In fact at any certain point in time, any company can have access to specific code Epic show in events, because it is unlikely that code will be made public, because it is not tweaked to all scenarios. Only companies with appropriate staff for dealing with that code would probably have access to it, like a big game studio, otherwise it will be a lot of trouble for Epic to diverge efforts, unless they are paid for it, just to support a version which will be completely different anyway.
What Epic is doing right now is making the engine ready for a public release in their regular releasing schedule and that everyone can have access to a universal code targeted for all industries: game, arch-viz and film.
At the 1st event, there were no promises on a specific release for it to be completed, but they were talking about its current state at every event they are participating. Is it a fraud? Absolutely no. It is a technology that needs time to mature and be ready for all usage scenarios, since they have different performance expectations.