Cycles is a great rendering engine, but at least in 2.70 the gpu renderer won't do SSS, so images with a decent skin shader need to be rendered on the cpu at the moment.

I had some success wrapping my head around blender in the last half year, so either I've become much more tolerant or the user interface has improved a lot. I think it's the latter, ad the feature set seems to be worth it.

 

 

A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships are built for.
Sail out to sea and do new things.
-"Amazing Grace" Hopper

Avatar image of me done by Chidori.