Quote - I am planning to (for free) make and maintain an improved Luxrender, one that has all of Lux goodness, plus the goodness of procedural textures and the ability to do organic geometry well instead of poorly.

That's nice, but if tomorrow you win the Lotto and retire on a paradise island in the Caribbean to perfect your tan (that's all I wish you) people will be stuck in Limbo.

Better make the Lux team accept those changes as official; After all it's open source, and I'm guessing the people who have build it so far won't refuse those improvements, especially if they don't require any work on their parts, and mean increasing all of a sudden their user base tenfold - even if they didn't see the point so far... 

As for using Luxrender instead of another renderer - People, think about it from a "content" point of view.
Lux compatibility might be the future for both Poser and DAZ Studio, allowing merchants to offer common Lux materials, for both Poser and DAZ Studio users to use. Finished the dumbed-down versions and the additional workload of making two different versions for the price of a single one: Just make Lux the official high-end renderer of both apps!
Smith Micro should definitely think about including the exporter/converter into Poser 9.
Unless of course they have a Firefly update ready, making it superior to the (current) Lux version (Somehow I doubt they do).... They have lost the content battle (by KO, since the first round), so their only hope (and ours too) is to refuse the battle they can't win, and rally under the neutral flag of Lux, which adds tons of perceived value to Poser, for very little cost.