All issues relating to modern contingent claims can be traced to the same general equilibrium framework established by Black and Scholes, and independently by Merton. It is now 1995 - some four decades after Markowitz's article and 20 years after the brilliant Black, Scholes, and Merton formulation. Portfolio optimization has become as trivial as high school matrix algebra and as easily implementable in spreadsheets. Everybody knows about implied volatility and the Black-Scholes formula. As elusive as it sometimes seems, the implied smile is no longer as mysterious as Mona Lisa's.
Exotic options are no longer that exotic.
Non-standard derivatives, we now call them. And with more powerful machines, computing time is no longer a constraint in the scheme of things. There are now more than a dozen supercomputers in active use in the financial industry today. Ds from the hard sciences. We will not remain poor academics - not anymore.