Quote - Ive experimented with DOF only a few times. The main reason is because the render options only allow DOF to be ticked if you have "premium" render quality ticked, which makes render times VERY slow.

Thats not entirely true.. premium settings arent slow per sé. If you want to just play around with DOF you will need to turn off all premium effects except DOF, which will avoid using processing power for unneeded effects.
Also you can easily lower the rpp to 4 to significantly speed up render times. the results are grainy but that doesnt matter for pre-view renders.
Once u have your DOF effect right, you can plop-render the blurriest area's for little pieces at 32rpp and see if its sufficiently noiseless. If it looks good, render ur image at 32rpp. If it doesnt look good, go to 64rpp with plop-render, and see if the noise has reduced enough then. usually you dont need to go further then 64rpp.
Ofcourse 32 and 64 rpp takes long but thats why u dont use them while setting up your DOF, and why u test with plop render 1st when trying to decide on the most effective rpp settings.
Bryce rendering is all about managing performance :-) The render might be slow, but there's loads of settings to speed up ur workflow untill ur at that final render.

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