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A lot of that suspicion that you and others were voicing was kind of nutty as some of it was around render times. How can you figure render times for an unbiased render? They are all different and all long, unless you use a GPU to render. It showed a deep lack of knowledge about unbiased renderers. Granted, Paolo should have addressed it more head on earlier but as he said recently, he didn't want to get bogged down in all the technical details. Some of those same folks who voiced suspicions are now happy users.
Kevin

But there was a very clear example posted (again, very early on) of two renders of an automobile, showing the difference between a Daz Studio render and one done with Reality/LuxRender.   The question of render times for those two specific renders were asked several times by at least a couple of different people.  The answers that Pret-a-3D gave were evasive, elusive and caused great suspicion.
It was a big red flag for those of us that did not want to deal with render times that take an extended overnight period!

The correct course of action, as a vendor, would have been to supply the correct render times for that particular render and let people decide for themselves if they wanted to have the kind of render take that long of a time to produce.  But instead, he was worried about "turning people off" and losing potential customers.  Honesty and full disclosure are always best when dealing with customers.

So that along with the other slightly sneaky salesman tactics were enough to cause me (and others) to go into a "Ralph Nader mode" and speak up for consumers' rights.

Maybe a bit over the top, but that's just how it felt.
Maybe I was unjustly feeling like the butt end of PT Barnum's "A sucker born every minute"?

And now, I realize if people are happy with this product, more power to them.  But I still think people should be made aware of their various choices and not feel like they have to deal with just one path to get that kind of rendering quality.