I agree, a better renderer then firefly definitely helps. Not that firefly is bad exactly, but it is so slow that it makes it very hard to try out lots things in it. So most people just stick with the defaults or whatever few light sets they buy. Which of course is not gonna look amazing. I know i got a lot better at lighting when i added XSI to my work. Nothing beats trying out different light/texture settings and doing a quick render as a learning tool.

Quote -
Firefly does neither radiosity nor sub surface scattering. For realistic images, both have to be faked. I assume, that would be the two main problems in creating truly photorealistic renders.

I wish there was an easy way to write shaders for firefly, like you can with other renderman renderers. There are some very cool shaders for SSS and such that i would love to port to it.  A wrap light shader would also rock. Ah well maybe eF will do something about this in future versions.