Obviously, you haven't dealt with lighting in other 3D applications. ;) The problem, and this is for 'artistes' who might not understand the maths and physics and models and programming, is that computers are not "reality machines". They are computational engines. That's all they do is perform math (boolean and arithmetic) on bits (1s and 0s). Everything else is built on top of this fundamental idea and structure. To make a long story short, in order to 'model' (as in physical simulation) reality in a computer, it requires, well, a model (physics) and math to back up that model. In a perfect universe, we could have a virtual light source which emits virtual photons which interact with virtual atoms/molecules in a virtual world so that we could place the sun in a scene and, voila!, instant real sunlight. Not even every computer on the planet networked together and running for millenia could do such modeling! It'd be amazingly realistic, but who's going to wait? :) So, we cheat in order to do things in a somewhat timely and cost-effective manner. This means that everything in a computer is approximation. Actually, worse, it's discreet approximation - since these are not analog engines. What you get are better and better approximations as better models and algorithms evolve to model reality. Now, I agree that all of these complexities in order to get natural lighting seem too much. This is the price to be paid for incremental evolution and cost of implementation of these approaches. You can get good realistic lighting with non-GI light sources, but you pay for that too. You pay for it in the number of lights and their proper strength, distribution, color, and other factors to simulate the ambient lighting that comes 'naturally' in the real world. I, for one, find the IBL/AO lighting to be a snap. You go to the Material Room, click on the IBL button for a selected Light, and add a probelight image. IBL is done. Turn on AO, done. It goes without saying that tweaking and tailoring are needed as each user, project, scene requires its own signature. Let's remember that there still isn't the "Make Art" or "Make Photorealistic" button in any 3D application, no matter how expensive...

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, you blow your whole leg off.

 -- Bjarne Stroustrup

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