Quote - I remember when I first got into 3d and taught myself using 3dsMax5 (30 days trial on a book - that was an intense month!). Area lights were basically (this is my understanding based on explanations in the manual and tutorials) equivalent to arrays of lights controllable as a single entity. They took an age to render with but did look great. I don't see why you couldn't build your own array and see if anyone could write a script to control these as one (might already be something out there like this).
It would be nice if Poser had area lights. RT samples and controls for lighting specific objects via the lights parameters would also be cool. But if there just two things right now that would blow me away it would be specular from HDRI lights and a proper translucency node.

but how does this work? 
would this be on the IBL. would the shadows come from AO? how is this in other 3d softwares?