Chris, poor show. All you had to do was mention John Carpenter's The Thing, and you'd have got an instant win.
While I appreciate there will always be some things CGI can do that animatronics can't, I still sit firmly on the side with Stan Winston and Jim Henson. Animatronics will always have that real tangibility that simply eludes CGI. Even Avatar, with it's $300 million effects budget, couldn't get rid of that glossy, uncanny-valley CG sheen.
It's funny that people always bring up Lord Of The Rings and Jurassic Park to defend CGI, as both those films relied rather a lot on actual physical effects to create the visual magic. Jurassic Park, while having IMO the best CGI of any film to date, used animatronics for all the key iconic scenes involving the dinosaurs (the T-Rex attacking the jeep, the dying Triceratops, the Velociraptors in the kitchen). Without Stan Winston, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park wouldn't have looked anywhere near as realistic. As for Lord Of The Rings, it's the non-CGI effects that hold up the best. The miniature sets they used for all the large fantasy cities and fortresses, the excellent prosthetic work on the orcs and Uruks. The CGI of Lord Of The Rings has actually dated rather badly, including Gollum. While it was impressive for the time, nowadays that hallmark CG intangibility is as clear as day on things like Gollum, the Cave Trolls and the Oliphants.
Compare that to The Thing, the go-to example of animatronic genius. Nearly 30 years on, and the special effects in the film are still nigh-on flawless. There's only one scene in the whole film where it's obvious the alien isn't real, and it's the one scene that used stop-motion animation instead of animatronics. Everything else is a work of puppeteering genius, and it still to this day looks unbelievably (in the best sense of the word) realistic. Mandatory Thing scene below:
Other examples? The Xenomorphs from the Alien series. The first two films have some of the wierdest, most terrifying alien creatures ever commited to celluloid, and not a scratch of CGI was used. Perhaps the most emotionally affecting example: ET. A film that managed to break the hearts of millions of kids (and parents) around the world, and the main character was played a a legless child in a suit, and a team of 14 puppeteers working in unison behind the sets. Again, ET is an alien who still looks realistic (and endearing) even to this day.
And there are more: Predator. An American Werewolf In London (with it's genre busting transformation effects). The Dark Crystal, which created an alien, mystical, beautiful world every bit as fantastical as Avatar, and quite a bit more tangible. With modern technology and engineering, there is practically no limit to what animatronics and puppets can do. Which is why I'm so happy that the new Hobbit films will focus more on animatronic creatures than the LOTR trilogy, according to Guillermo del Toro (before he left, of course).
