Cloud rendering is a fantasy for games on flat screens, because the latency is too high. To maintain 'presence' and not get sick in VR, the motion-to-photons latency has to be _consistently_ <20ms.
360 video for VR is certainly a bandwidth-hog, but I think that could well be offset by most VR content being game-like, where, though the game might weigh in at 40G, you download it once, and spend 40 hours in it, vs a 4k movie at the same size, which lasts 2 (and which you'd likely re-stream if you watched it again). In other words, widespread VR use, even with next-gen hardware, could actually lead to a reduced demand for bandwidth.
Anecdote: I used Erlang, over the course of several years, for very-high-level bot behavior and multi-player mission control, where performance was much less important than the things Erlang provides, but I still had issues with it. Nonetheless, I felt it had given me great leverage, and I thanked Joe Armstrong profusely, when I met him at a conference. Later at the con, I asked a panel whether there were active efforts at improving performance, perhaps with a JIT. They seemed to take it as an attack, and suggested that if I need performance, I should use another language. I mostly write in Clojure now.
I don't have time to read through the thread today, but I did before the Rift kickstarter was announced, and my impression has always been that the software-distortion-in-compensation-for-simpler-optics[1] idea was already out there when Carmack chimed in.
1. Allowing the screen to be much closer, drastically improving practically achievable FOV.
Cyberneticists are not ignorant of your viewpoint. You may be right 'ultimately', but you might find your views refined if you actually dug into the arguments. Stafford Beer addresses "variety reduction" in the first of these lectures:
Edit: as a quick software-design analogy, I think Cybernetics gets labeled "top down" design, by people who think there are only top-down and bottom-up to choose from. It's more of a middle-out strategy.
I don't know a lot about chess, but I would try picking several prolific players with what seem to you to be different styles, and training a classifier to identify the player, as an experiment in viability.