Abysmally slow? Have you used Bryce or any other program like that? Now "that" is abysmally slow. In comparison to Firefly and a few other quickie render apps Studio holds up pretty well. Then again I'm used to waiting 18 hours to 10 days for a render to finish so maybe I'm more forgiving. I agree that the screen layout isn't precisely what I like. Everything is somewhat on the large side. I'd rather that Daz followed a little more closely the lightwave style (if that's their intention) and made the menu and slider controls somewhat smaller. More workspace, less panel size. The layout may be user customisable later depending on whether they clean up the graphic overlays which means we could see some very attractive alternatives developed but that's an interesting question considering the way it's currently designed. I'm far more inclined towards large work area and small tool bars myself so the Daz interface actually strikes me as rather ugly and clumsy, especially as it takes so much screen space to display. Dragging all the tabs into one area doesn't significantly increase the work area which I find rather sad. This may improve as Daz get more feedback from users during the beta stage.