This bit of info might help...

As for my opinion on renderers?

Internal's still needed for some effects though (Cycles doesn't have everything yet, like fire/smoke), but Cycles is a better render environment in terms of how lighting is handled. Nodes for building materials in Cycles is also pretty awesome once you get your head around it. Yet some things are still faster to knock out using BI even though it may be considered depreciated in terms of future development. The original render engine also tends to be faster for animation in most cases. (Unless you're willing to turn down samples and have noisy grainy renders in Cycles.)

I'd say to learn both, and also put in practice with how scene linking works and making use of the compositor to get the best of both worlds. (You get to use the FX Cycles doesn't have, and apply them to Cycles renders.)

It's funny though, I tried Blender a few times in the past and could never get anywhere. Then saw some Cycles stuff and tried one more time with 2.68 and found the new (2.5+) UI easier to navigate, so now I'm hooked. Let's just say I find it amusing to see people come back to it and be as confused as I was when I couldn't manage to do anything more than a cube with the old UI.

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One more note. Nodes in Blender Internal and Cycles are not the same. You may experience oddness or crashes trying to use same mats for both engines. What you may want to do is duplicate a scene and have different material sets made for the different render engines. Something you may want to keep track of if getting into compositing work between the two renderers available to Blender.

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Barbequed Pixels?

Your friendly neighborhood Wings3D nut.
Also feel free to browse my freebies at ShareCG.
There might be something worth downloading.