I'm surprised they didn't go with the fact that ray tracing shoots rays out of the camera rather than having light radiate from light sources.
"That's a scientifically outdated view of how light works! Light enters your eyes, not the other way around! What is this? Emission theory? Are we back in the 1600s? They've played us for absolute fools."
Exactly ! this makes the problem potentially millions of times easier, since you know with certainty that every ray fired is going to contribute to the image, whereas firing rays from the light source would guarantee you never see most of them, the processing power is wasted and your image never converges