When BSA selects them for auditing, the IT-manager will get the heat, because software licenses are his responsibility.

He bothers because he is paid for it.

The advantage of 3D graphics, even without zooming the camera, is that it means you've gone away from the limits of the sprite sets. Consider how silly top-down flying games like Star Control looked when the ships could only point in eight directions. You fire your gun and the shot passes to the right of the target, turn one click, now it passes to the left. Ridiculous. IF this ship were rendered, you would have a true 360 degrees of rotation without creating an intolerable number of bitmaps.

The things you describe have nothing to do with the "number of dimensions" a graphics engine uses. Asteroids, for example, is 2D and has a rendered ship. If you have been grown in 3D it can be possible that you consider the restricted movement in some 2D games a limitation. On most 2D games the limited movement is just part of the game play. Game play consists of many things. Free movement is not an absolute value that guarantees improved game play.

Why should we care about the number of bitmaps? If the game works, then it works and the number of bitmaps should not be an issue to anyone.

BTW, all the older "full 3D" FPS games pretended to provide free movement but still did not allow the character to do the simplest ordinary things (like climbing on top of things). How ridiculous would that be?