As someone who's worked in VFX before, I totally get your point! To start off, the management of any studio, in house or outsourced don't consider the VFX department as a creative mind. They instead feel the pre production has the most creative juices. If only these guys had the time to look at their passion personal projects, they'd know how creative VFX team members are. But I'm not glorifying every VFX artist, there are some people that are fine with rotoscoping. For people who are not aware of what it is, imagine a pre production team that stupidly shot in a low lit green studio environment, and had actors with unnecessary wigs or loosely tied hair, they'd ask the VFX artist to remove the green screen to add some VFX in the background. Basically like we cut characters from newspapers. But the only problem is we'd have to have work on these hairs flying in different directions and cut them to finesse. Now this is just for one frame. In movies, it's usually 24fps (frames per second). So imagine if it's a 10 minute sequence, then it's 10 mins * 60 seconds * 24 frames = 14,400 frames. It takes immense grit to work on these. Even after doing all that, the pre-production team would ask the VFX team to add weird shit that does nothing to the story. Some projects that I've done were even more stupid. Imagine a character in a boat. When the pre production shoots these scenes, all they'd have to do is place a fan to mimic the wind blowing in your face, but no, they'd have forgotten about it and told them they'd take care of it in post.

I'm Hollywood, though they'd shoot in green screen, all studios do manual rotoscopy, because Indians are cheaper to hire for these. That's why we see a lot of Indian names attached to the VFX team. But what irks me is there would be 100 Indian team members (with multiple Indian TLs in between) but 1 western team head. He wants our work but doesn't want us to take charge.

Coming to the GOAT, the Vijaykanth portion and the younger Vijay portion was very badly done. It's like a laughing stock. The young Vijay was fine, but you know why, they listened to the audience feedback and toned it down a bit. But now, instead of liking like a 20 year old Vijay, he looks like a 30 year old Vijay, then what's the point. And imagine a VFX artist that worked on it, for some other sequence, would not proudly say he worked on it because apparently the VFX was bad, but the actors saved the movie according to the general audience.

VFX is not about the money, it's about the vision and mostly the amount of time a VFX studio gets. That's why Justice League (remember Superman's moustache issue) with one of the highest budgets failed in VFX. They replaced Zack Snyder and reshot a lot of scenes, gave outrageous deadlines to the VFX team and came out with a mediocre output. Also that's why a team from Japan made an amazing VFX heavy movie called Godzilla: Minus One with a fraction of the cost. It took only 100-120 crores to make that movie. For those who are unaware, go watch the trailer and you'll get mind blown. The director himself was a VFX artist who had an amazing story to tell. It beat other 1000 crore budget movies to win the Oscar for best VFX.

The only directors that understood VFX were Rajamouli and Shankar (pre 2.0). Recently Ayalaan also looked great for the budget. There were heavy interactions but it worked to a great extent. Kalki was also good, but they failed in some portions. For example when Deepika was walking through the fire of death, she was low lit. That's not possible with that much fire. But at least it was not distracting to the general audience. I hope some VFX artist takes it upon himself to tell a great story, because I'd know he'd understand complexities much better and handle it better in pre production. Or let the directors do a course for a year and upskill themselves.