[JJ_SO]

I haven't seen Ironman so don't get the reference, but basically most things can be solved by a brute force method. Capture as much data as you can, then pick out the bits you really want. I was thinking of keeping within the visible spectrum here. There would of course still be physical limits. I'm not expecting a movie style "enhance that" and be able to pick off someone's fingerprint on a glass via a reflection off some other surface!

 
Well, what would you expect then? Where are the processors and which kind of sensors (talking of a unit with glass and sensor grid) to grab this brute force stuff? Reading your text I start asking myself if a squirrel would take a whole forest in his mouth, just because it expects to find some nuts or seeds in this collection. Brute force is what people do if we're not smart enough to hack a password or to compromise a server. I don't think, my way in photography will become a hyper-collecting individual with no time to select what matters to me. Can't see the advantages.
 

I do see the possible advantages of Foveon type sensors, but they aren't keeping up with the bayer behemoth. Sigma were too late to the party. The Merrill era came too late by which point they lost most of their potential advantage over bayer sensors.

It depends what you consider "advantage". Regarding high ISO, you're right. Regarding high resolution, I see the Foveon 16MP beating the D810 36 MP, switched to DX, by a remarkable margin. If it comes to details and contrast, to texture and clarity, the Foveon sensor appears to be superior - but I want to run a couple of comparisons for my own comprehension of what's going on. If it comes to contrast range, things become difficult to compare. The Sigma software has one slider others don't have and within limits it does a bit of magic. But then, the whole software package is for people who dare to suffer...   
 

I think we are closer to moving towards computational photography. That is, get data by whatever sources available and work out the image from that. Didn't someone make a smartphone with two or more sensors in it for example? I've even wondered if something like interferometry might be a future development to increase visible imaging potential in smaller form factors. I'm not holding my breath for consumer level aperture synthesis to be available any time soon.

"Computational phtography" I did years before when I was rendering scenes, models and textures designed in CAD. Do you wanna create artificial images? I don't, anymore. I'd rather learn how to paint than how to create synthetic languages, but maybe I do have a total wrong imagination of what you wrote about.