feature film at 2K is pretty much 10TB of data. Even offloading that sort of pipeline from your local machine to a machine down the hall invokes a SAN.|

Well yes, that's the point. Instead of building monster desktop machines, you build monster server machines and monster storage arrays, in bulk. 10 TB might be a lot to a desktop, but for AWS, it's a drop in the bucket.

My last reference for video work (Also a few years ago) was being told that you'd want at least 16 GB for compositing, though more was always better. Let's pull numbers out of my ass and quadruple that for today. I can find one of those on EC2 already. Not only that, it's barely $2 / hr.

Storing 10 TB? Fire up a couple EBS volumes and stripe your data across them.

Note that I Am Not A Network Engineer (Professionally, anyways), AWS might not be the right service for the job. Chances are, this is not optimal advice. Additionally, you still need a service that provides a low latency connection to your artists' thin clients and I don't have a good reference of EC2 instances' latency versus time.

But hey, it's a start?

Now to mull through the rest of your questions:

If the gamers will no longer need high-end computing, then does it matter if the gamers are running on entry level hardware?

Above entry level, below $1k in final price. Costs are shrinking, though still not non-existent.

And if you don't understand my world, how do you know it's "ridiculously overpriced?" Are there not economics of production there, too? Or are you turning opinions into facts in order to maintain your worldview?

Ridiculously overpriced from the point of view of an amateur. My impression was always that the numbers were set to what the market could bear. What prices make sense in the context of a $10m production still seemed insane to a teenage thundara wanting to toy around with 3d renderers back in the day.