This does sound like a great idea. I don't have anything playable yet. But if the depth jam is going to be late fall, it may be good timing for me.

The think with lack of focus on individuals may be an important factor. Not sure how deliberate this was. It seems to me like this was partially an unconscious process as budgets and team size increased. The people "in charge" drifted into administrative positions. I think Peter Molyneux is a good example.

Another Aspect that occurred to me: especially American culture has very few precedence of mature topics in animation. American comics have been also struggling with this problem a lot. I believe that the experience with mature topics in Anime and Manga helped  a great deal as a gateway to get those topics into Japanese games. That influence is clearly visible in ICO and Shadow of the Colossus.

Since the PS2 era, the entire Industry shifted it's focus on American productions - possibly starting with Halo and GTA3.

Haha, no. 

And actually, their "engine" is nothing special really, it just shows still images and animations. Their achievement is rather that they seem to have developed an entire production process of generating these interactive environments.

Kubikfoto3 is an interesting German agency that developed a photographic production pipeline for interactive environments. Sound pretty vague but it starts making sense if you look at the examples.

It's basically the old Point & Click formula with good photography, well-made video transitions and some very simple yet effective interactive effects at each screen.
http://www.kubikfoto.de/

Being an advertising agency, their projects are mostly pretty awful content-wise. I found them by accident through this "interactive hip-hop video". The usual crap of youngsters rapping about how dangerous they are and how they kill people and such stuff.
http://www.kiz-neuruppin.de/

An older Flash website I found when doing research for TRAUMA. This one works almost like a point & click adventure but from what I gather there are no real puzzles or challenges. There is no objective either. Yet, it is certainly more interactive than a mere image gallery. Each image has a commentary, some interactive elements and an audio track.

http://hospital.apoka.com

When I was working on TRAUMA. I found this interesting Project from Berlin. I guess you could almost call it a hidden object game but the fact that you can fast forward to any room destroys all notion of challenge and leaves you with a gallery of marginally interactive photos. I found it refreshing and inspiring.

http://www.99rooms.com/