I completely agree with you that the information in that paper is excellent and I think it's amazing that Disney is so willing to share so much information about their renderer, even though their sister company Pixar sells a renderer.

The question though is whether or not this paper should have been published at EGSR. Personally I think that an EGSR paper should either propose a novel idea or should provide a good survey of the field. I don't think this paper succeeds at either of those. Their method is 'simply' a combination of already published ideas and I don't think that they do a very good job at comparing those existing ideas.

Personally, I think this paper would have been better suited as a talk at SIGGRAPH, a publication at JCGT or a technical report (like Pixar). So: great paper, wrong venue.