Quote - i got all excited by the path-tracing.  

Don't put the carriage before the horse ;-)

What is it that you want in your renders? Volumetrics? Caustics? Speed? Not having to tweak parameters? For example, if you want fast caustics, (progressive) photon mapping is almost always better than path tracing, where for outdoor scenes illuminated with a sky dome, a good path tracer is probably a better option.

If you want to try out many render engines without having to spend a lot of money, there are plenty of options for Blender, and as far as I know, both Yafaray and Luxrender have photon mapping modes.

If you just want to use the monte carlo approach to avoid interpolation artifacts, you can simply uncheck "progressive mode" in Poser 10/2014's render settings, crank up the pixel samples and wait. It won't give you caustics, but will use brute force ray tracing for everything, including indirect diffuse light (though no SSS at this point).