Ok... As part of a recent and long overdue pipeline/hardware Upgrade 

I recently made the Jump up from  Daz Studio 2.3 on OSX

 to DS 4.7 windows

Animation tools?? ..What can I say....  :-( 

not much new going there and yes I can now personally confirm that creation of keyframes with IK on.. and later creating body movement frames with it off  destroys the animation done before that point.......still broken :-/

Looking at options for alternative rendering ( Firefly= Non Starter for me) 

Congrats on the upgrades! Yah. On the other hand, there seems to be more animators asking, so maybe the volume is getting up there enough to matter more.....

I mean, it =could= happen......

As for rendering options, Vue is still there. A lot of people are using either the Reality bridge with Luxrender, Or Octane with its python bridge. Octane requires Nvidia cards with CUDA capable GPUs (and stable Nvidia drivers.....). Don't have the GameDev version yet, so I can't comment on the features there. However, there are also some activation issues there, so... If you anticipate using a game engine for rendering of something like machinima, it would probably be worth it (the mesh decimation feature alone would be worth it, if you didn't have access to a robust modeler, which you do, I think).