I agree Vue is a nice program on its own.  However when it comes to the actual render I personally have found Lux to be far superior as you said, "with less work".  I have done several renders comparing Vue vs DAZ vs Lux... Lux as far as I can tell does a MUCH better and more believable job MUCH more quickly (again with the less work). 

You can get some dang good results (as seen in the movies) with vue.  But you have to fork over mad sums of cash to get those results.  I myself own Vue frontier 9 (cheapo version compared to infinite / xstreme) and it is very nice, but equally limited, Lux... is free.

So when it comes to my basic renders of small prebuilt scenes and models... I use Lux.  When it comes to making terrain and the like... I use Vue.  But if I could use Lux to render for Vue... that would be amazing!