i might agree with the plea to replace Firefly.  it seems to take a lot of work to get to do things that are basic to other renderers. 

transmapped hair isn't the only issue with Firefly's glacial speed with rendering transmapped items.  think lace, fine silk, tulle, etc.  and that doesn't even get into things that use transmaps over polys for complex shapes, like flower petals and leaves.    there's tons of stuff i'd like to do with layers of dynamic clothes that will mean literally days of rendering at my preferred resolution and using raytraced shadows in Firefly.  it takes a few hours using the old Blender internal renderer, raytraced shadows, and much higher quality settings.

and it supports many more features than Firefly, as does Yafaray.  and then there are the free unbiased renderers, which i'd love to have as an option. 

i'm not asking for the same level of rendering that software priced in the thousands provides.  but i would like the same level of rendering other apps provide for free.  i actually wouldn't care if Poser used Firefly to do this.  but it seemed to take tons of effort to make Firefly perform basic GI and render faster, and we still don't have caustics, glowing materials, area lights, SSS, or even translucence that works properly.  i completely and totally acknowledge the large amount of very good, hard  work that's been done on the renderer.  but if after that much hard work it's still way behind free renderers, i have to wonder if it even makes sense to keep trying to make it into something it obviously isn't right now.

i mean, it's kind of crazy that even with all the time i've spent mastering Matmatic and Poser materials, even though i've paid for Poser, i'm still looking into switching to Blender for rendering. i'll support any choice that will get us to the same quality and render speed as free, open source renderers.