Raytracing helps make realistic art possible. But it still takes a great artist to do it. There are so many subtleties to the way common surfaces reflect light that are hard to capture, even once you are given all the sliders you can dream of. My experience dabbling with Blender, was that it can be quite frustrating: you KNOW what you have set up doesn't look quite perfect yet, but you can't quite express WHY or what you need to change in the material definition to fix it. So you end up settling for "ok", meaning the resulting render looks pleasing -- but it still looks like a render.
But I guess that's why I'm not an artist.