Quote - I've downloaded LuxRenderer, but if it's going to take me 5 hours to render a scene that PPro takes 20 minutes to do, I probably won't be buying Reality3 at all.  That sort of wait for a render, no matter how good it looks, just isn't worth it for me.

If that's the case, then Reality is definitely not for you.

My own brief experience using Reality with DAZ a couple years ago taught me that Lux is the ultimate test of patience for 3D art hobbyists.  For me, however, the results are absolutely worth it.

Case in point, this was my first Reality render, created in March 2011, using DAZ Studio to set it up.  It took 48 hours in Lux (due in large part to the high resolution) to reach a level of image quality I was happy with, and would have been impossible to achieve with Firefly (it's work safe):

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2179882&user_id=463114&np&np

I switched back to Poser a couple of projects later after learning that Reality was incompatible with procedural shaders.  Thankfully, with Reality 3 for Poser, that is no longer the case, and I can finally stop being envious of DAZ users when I start new projects.  ;)