Also, remember that the earlier images were done with Carrara 1 and 2, which are somewhat limited in both stability and functionality compared to version 3 AFAIK. So those early artists were battling against limited software that crashed all the time and was horribly slow. For example, trying to do a realistic GI render on a very fast machine in C2 takes several hours for a small (800X800) image. That kind of snail's pace can wreak havoc with any tweaking or planning that we'd need to get a Rubens-like result.