Ansel Adams was an artist, he had the time, and a relatively comfortable family background that gave him the ability to invest the time he had into creating art. When I am creating artistic images I too take the time and stand on the shoulders of those that learnt and went before us to maximize the limitations of the equipment we use. I don't have to work out the zone system because Adams did it for me and wrote it down, I often bracket a natural scene in 2/3 stop and use tonal blending (dodging and burning in Adams day) though normally end up using a single exposure and find I am not DR limited.
However Adams didn't have the pressures of actual commercial high turnover work, he had the wherewithal to pick and choose his work, I don't, for me to achieve the volume of images I need to to keep afloat I need to use other techniques others might call tricks, or cheating. Multiple exposures, flambient exposures etc etc, I overcome the DR limitations I come up against in the timeframe I have in other ways, my skill.
This has all gotten away from my original point which was all comparable cameras are within a stop of each other with regards DR, Canon, once justifiably seen as being a fair distance behind, are not behind now to any meaningful degree and no camera company is pushing any new boundaries, to get any meaningful improvements in DR we are going to need to go to 16 bit files and even then the difference between now and another couple of stops isn't that meaningful.
My 'issue', such that it is, is a DR range much bigger than 12-14 stops, or. 14-16 stops, it is closer to 20 stops. But even in those extreme situations I can still get the images I need and my customers demand. People clamoring for 'more DR' don't seem to give the impression that they actually look at their images or know where their cameras limitations actually are. They have become parrots constantly repeating what they have heard over the last couple of years without any deep understanding of what the words mean, where their camera truthfully is compared to it's competition and without realizing what modest gains are possible within current technology.