I think DustRider's points make a lot of sense, and I really think Carrara users should be very excited about being able to use Carrara with Octane seamlessly, with an integrated bridge plugin.

As for Embree, I think the assumption that the addition of this feature in Carrara would increase interest of the package to the point of increasing users 10x what they are now, per week, is highly unlikely, and a very risky proposition for Daz to assume.

All Embree would do is make the current engine faster.  The current engine is quite a bit outdated (although a good solid raytracer) as it is, so I can't really see where there would be THAT many newly interested users of it, just because of the speed increase.  Heck, many Poser users are using Reality with Luxrender, which is the SLOWEST rendering combination I can think of today, and are quite happy with it, because the results are awesome, with minimal manual input.  Getting beautiful renders from Luxrender/Reality is far easier than getting beautiful renders from Firefly, you just have to wait longer, and people seem to be willing to do that.  So assuming there's thousands of folks out there just waiting to buy Carrara when it's current render engine is faster, is kind of an overambitious prediction.

Meanwhile, Octane, on the other hand, provides a truly different and modern engine.  One that uses not only unbiased Path Tracing algorythms, but also can be set to do biased raytracing, like Vray, and increase render speed on scenes where you may not need ultra-realistic lighting by a factor of 4x or more.  Octane has several built-in render mode kernels to pick from, and this versatility alone is like having 3 or 4 different render engines in one.  Of course, it's GPU based, so a good card is needed for optimum results, but on average, any Nvidia GTX card that is newer than a year old is more than enough to see incredible render speeds with unbiased results.  So you can spend say $200 or so on a card, and get very fast photorealistic results from Octane, but chances are that any GTX card will provide results that are impressive to the average user of many CPU render engines.

I really think if Daz is going to invest 6 months of dev time to something, it should be effort put toward improving the current features in Carrara, like the modelling tools, and other things, which may not be bullet point features, but would certainly create renewed interest in the package from people who may currently be using Blender, or some other packages that are overall confusing to hobbyists.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.