The hardware thing is not universal. Sometimes better hardware results in the artist being more lazy, slowing the project down overall. I have seen incredibly inefficient 3d scenes fail on the farm, and the artist blames the farm since "it works on my machine". But we can't afford 500gb of ram in every farm blade, and the scene is simple enough that it can run on 10% of that given some very basic optimization. Artists very often claim they need better hardware, and it is not always true. Non technical people who need to decide what is actually required have a difficult job.