Quote - There was an interesting read over at CGTalk with a big time modeler who is actually using 5 sided polys with success. He is picking and choosing where to put them but never the less he's purposefully using them. He was in the 4sided poly camp for a very long time.

Yeh that was Stahlberg, and he's always been a little weird :p But note that he was talking about Maya, which has proper catmul clark subds. CC subds handle anything you throw at them with no problem including tris, ngons, poles etc. The real problems arise in apps (like poser) that dont use them.

Quote - No, I only wish I knew why that is, but them's the breaks.

It's because REYES renderers dont actually render triangles (or any form of polygons) They render what are called bicubic patches, which are mathematically always 4 sides. So when you load a mesh that has more or less then 4 sided polys, they are broken up into 4 sides first (tris are promoted to quads with one degenerate edge) and this translation takes time.