Its not hard to do but let use meka thengs ABSOLUTELY clear here. The instancer is there to make things easier on the computer, not exactly you the users preference. It may seem nitpickeing to talk of terminology here but its about the most relevant thing here.
INSTACE menas a exact copy of a object, not a copy of a object at any possile time, since thet defeats the pupose of a instancer. the purpose of the isntancer is to have a very finite numer of states, now if you slap a scene with 20 different 100 frame animations for 100 objects it would peroformance wise be NO difference if you copied those things in the firstplace (so the userw would benefit form less clutter but thera re ways to avoid this alltogether).
Se the instancer is BY design limitted, baceuse anyone using the isntancer as their primary boid or bahavioristic tool is allmost crtainly lacking in resouces to calculate all the cneccesesry stuff needed for this.
So i will agree with you if you cann agree to wihstand following evitable penalties acssociated with such tools.
a ) dont call it instancer becaus ethat defeats the purpose of having terminology and the also defeats the purpos e of theisntancer in the firstplace.
b ) Expect it to be no better than habving hunderds of copies of those objects in firstplace, only you use paricle dymanics to coregraph those objects (and as a matter of fact you can allready do this)
on the otherhand, intancer could allow for different materials per isntance like prman allows (even pixar wasnt stupid enough to turn the instancer into boid machine because gain it would defeat the purpose of getting mice slow read archives in use)
PS and before anyone satrts yelling me workarounds are bad let me remind you entire buisness of CG is a workaround to the fact that we cant do everything in reality... or even less abstratct the reason we use sampling renderers, polygons and stuff is because making a full solve is still too hard to do. We will ge there bit not yet. So our entire technology is based on a quite few FUNDAMENTAL WORKAROUNDS. So workarounds are our business, not the other stuff, wich is what we strive for with the workarounds.