Well, at the time, I wasn't sure about the optimum render settings, as things were still very basic in the interface. That's no longer the case. I also am aware now about ways to get rid of fireflies based on how I set up my scene that I wasn't aware of.

With render engines like Cycles and iRay, you tend to have to let the render engine do several passes before you get a quality image if you're rendering passes with Superfly you can render passes or have it do a full render right away, which was something else I didn't know about until recently.