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To buy $1700 dollar full application&$75 dollar plugin  just to render GI stills of Vicky&Mike& Mikki 5 or whatever, does not make good economic sense to me.
there are other alternatives to poser Firely that are more sensible IMHO

Well, whether it makes good economic sense requires a bit of arithmetic and an understanding of the individual's circumstances.

I'm self-employed and I don't work as many hours as I could. In fact, if I could put 600 hours in a week, there would still be work to do, and that work would, in all likelihood, increase my income. By how much, I'm not sure. If I were more ambitious, I'd do some more serious analysis. But suffice it to say: every minute I spend not working is money I am not making.

So, if I have to do 200 test images before I'm happy with final poses, lighting, camera angle, etc, and each test image takes an average of 5 minutes, I've spent 1000 minutes on test images. If I can halve that time, I've saved 500 minutes. On a single image.

How much is 500 minutes worth? Obviously, the answer is different for everyone. But if one makes, for example, $20/hour, it's .33/minute. So: $166.67 savings. On one single image.

Now for people who are working a set schedule, who cannot persuade their bosses to let them work 20 hours a day, the time savings don't correlate to money in such a direct way.

But you do see my point about speed being the primary issue I'm interested in, right?

ETA: Obviously the time spent learning new software has to be factored in, along with the time spent adjusting all the materials/shaders/etc. So if some of that can be avoided, it's very useful too. But the brute force speed of rendering is what I'm curious about. And I've never heard anyone describe Vue as a fast renderer. So I've been hesitant about it.

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PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.