Interesting. Blender has always looked like a very versatile and powerful app. Its main negative has always been a somewhat 'unique' interface. I don't know how the new one looks or works. Hopefully it leans toward a more familiar 3D application GUI.

Using Blender seems like overkill if all you want is to access a render engine, but if it's the most direct way available at the moment, you go with what you've got. If Blender offers multiple render options, so much the better. Once you're in Blender, you may even find reason to use other aspects of that program. It does seem though that even experienced Blenderistas will may have to learn a new material system. People who've never used Blender would have that plus learning at least the Basics of Blender I would think.

What I would love to have is something like PoseRay with a plugin architecture - call it RenderHub :-) With the .obj/.pz3 import, GUI, etc. already done in the core application, hopefully people would write plugin exporters for some of these great new render engines/programs. The level of feature support might vary e.g. PoseRay has extensive support for POVRay lights, cameras and materials, but it presently supports only Kerkythea mesh export. Even the latter is very helpful though. It would be even better if the plugins all supported a small common set of materials like glass and at least a decent basic human skin in their respective rendering applications. You'ld only have one interface to learn, and if you were content with bitmaps and the 'universal' materials, you wouldn't have to worry about different material systems for the supported render engines.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken