I'm thrilled about the new developments as well. :D  Have you been able to use displacement on a sphere primitive in Bryce? I tried it and had a crash. I think I had it past 5 so maybe that's why.

   This is a quick and dirty render of displacement on a sphere primitive in Carrara. I have some cliff and rock face images from cgtexture.com. I took one and made a greyscale copy with some gaussian blur and dropped it into the displacement and bump channels and applied the color image for the texture. Stack a few of these and rotate them and you've got an almost instant rock stack.
I wonder if the developers are borrowing a few code snippets here and there from Carrara to enhance Bryce's expanded abilities?