I don't feel it's a matter of wasting time, but taking the time to tweak paramenters. To be honest, I don't  have Esprit and I'm not familiar with the options in that build of Vue.

About 2 weeks ago,I started a WIP and I could not for the life of me properly texture a tree that I had included in the scene and then modified to fit what I'd wanted in the plant editor.I asked around on this board,and other boards about this.I, too, have used a large texture map 1200x1000 for this one tree.Tried every option,the tree never did map properly. I ended up hiding the worst parts behind some other plants.I liked the lighting I was getting,and tried an animation.Same as yours, I had that "swimming" as it was described to me.I've described it back to you as it was described to me,and I've nutshelled it a bit from the responses of about 12 different people.Most answers came from people that use Maya and XStream.

I would think that with any product, what we see advertised would be the best that product had to offer.Map resolution and file types of the maps always play a factor, but I don't believe they are the only factors in play. Graininess in renders has been mentioned many times concerning Vue.When I tried the Maya PLE it took me a lot more work to get a mediocre render than with 3D Max,but the toolset in Maya was far more advanced.One thing suggested to me was to render much larger than intended and then resize.Another tip was to bake the illumination before the render.I haven't tried this as the animation wasn't as important to me as the still.

If you could, let us know if you find a solution for your animation.These are problems that have been presented before, I've encountered the same,and I'd like to know more.Using displacement was also suggested to me, but I took the easier road and just hid the parts of the tree that looked stretched.