#1 congrats to your catch and welcome to the club Ine.

#2 you are absolutely right, it is not sooo easy. Double the RAM does not mean half the rendering time. But indeed, as much as possible RAM does help - to work more "fluent" with more complex scenes. And i am sure in just a little time you will create scenes with an amount of polygons you never even dreamed of before.

What is a big help are additional machines to let a render farm do the number crunching in rendering. The more the better. Infinite comes with five licenses for Cows already, so you will be able to reduce rendering times drastically with that. Add the desktop from your neighbor, your partner, your ..., add the laptop, add everything that has a processor and Windows or Mac OS X on it. To install abd bundle those cows is VERY easy, even i was able to do that.

One day your ship comes in - but you're at the airport.