John, you've made the same mistake as many others. You've done it with respect to art in general as opposed to the ones who address HDR specifically. You've imparted your objective position onto a subjective subject. And that is what's wrong. And that's not a subjective issue. HJ has suggested what he 'expects' art to be. An expectation isn't a hard and fast, objective construct. Anything that captures or freezes a moment in time isn't realistic. If I can't go to that place and see exactly what is in that photo or painting or movie or drawing or 3D rendering then it's not realistic. The only true realism is what I, or anyone else, can see with my own eyes. I can choose to believe or not the reality someone else saw and the way they present that reality to me and accept it as real but it's not truly real to me.
I'm getting a sense this argument is becoming convoluted and confused.
The problem as I see it is both the eye and the camera have limited dynamic range. The eye has the disadvantage of a very narrow FoV (excluding peripheral vision which detects only movement), but has the advantage of an easily executed rapid change of direction of view, combined with a continuously changing aperture to accommodate changing brightness levels in whatever scene is being viewed.
Without bracketing of exposures, do we miraculously expect the camera with its
fixed aperture to faithfully capture a scene from the brightest part of the sky to the darkest shadows, shadows which are in fact, from the eye's perspective, not dark at all, because the eye's aperture in a fraction of a second has changed from F8 to F2.8, as its gaze is directed at such darker areas of the scene?
It seems to me to be a tradition in photography and many styles of paintings (I'm thinking here of Caravaggio) to unnaturally darken parts of an image for artistic impact. Black shadows create a sense of 'pop'. They also have the effect of removing distracting elements in the image, similar to the effect of a shallow DoF.
If you want to create a piece of art which does
not represent what the 'average' eye saw, but which represents a whole lot of cultural ideas, personal preferences and idiosyncracies, then almost anything goes, depending on which authoritative figure endorses the work.
As I see it, the purpose and goal of merging different exposures to HDR is to mimic how the eye behaves as it views a scene, in order to reproduce a composite (merged) image which includes all the detail in the scene which the eye would have witnessed.
Compressing that wide dynamic range to fit naturally on a medium such as monitor or print is the problem.
It's a problem that requires skill in image processing, as well as sophistication of software.