Presets would be a good idea.

Saying it requires a PhD is way over the top, though. Why? Because most frankly bad IDL renders are still better than pre-IDL renders. And anybody who wants an out-of-the-box press-a-button solution surely wasn't getting very good results in earlier versions.

Of course, I'm with PJZ all the way: let's get this thing improved.

OTOH, I've bought enough software to know that it's utter crap to tell other people not to buy because you've had a bad experience. With any piece of software, and particularly one that's undergone a major revamp, there are bad experiences. And the bad experiences are always the loudest voices, by the nature of the case. People who are breezing through things are often too busy having fun to waste time at forums. It's the people who are either having relatively unusual difficulties, or who are unusually demanding from either themselves ("help me to learn how to do this better, even though my renders make almost everyone else's look like cartoons") or their software ("I want a talent button"), that will post the most often.

That's not an advisory to buy. Any new version of virtually any software whatsoever goes through kinks. (It's BS to say it wasn't beta-tested enough. It is pretty much impossible to beta test for every possible scenario without involving the entire user base.) Whether the improvements sound significant enough to weigh against the various headaches a new release can bring, only the potential purchaser himself can decide.

Personally, I've had P8 two days and I've had problems. But I don't regret my purchase.

FWIW.

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Hardware: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/MSI MAG570 Tomahawk X570/Zotac Geforce GTX 1650 Super 4GB/32GB OLOy RAM

Software: Windows 10 Professional/Poser Pro 11/Photoshop/Postworkshop 3