Quote - Would love to hear what you knowledgible people think of this as opposed to Octane.

It's not bad, but the reason I mentioned Octane is that it is ridiculously cheap (even more so while in beta) and is probably the only high end renderer that poser guys can easily afford. And it's MLT-unbiased at that. I mean MachStudio Pro is $5000 after all. For that much money you may as well just buy MAX and VRay/VRay-RT instead or wait a bit and get iRay free with the next version of MAX/Maya/XSI.