I don't think that ray tracers hate point lights. It's just that in reality, we usually don't have point lights, all our light sources have dimensions, size. Superfly uses spheres for point lights, so that should not be a problem. Real point lights look unrealistic because they are unrealistic. Its kind of lighting everything with a very tiny, ultra bright LED light, and that does not look good in reality either.

If you want to create a realistic environment, you need the reflected light from the walls, that 's correct. The ceiling, the floor. Superfly will do that for you, without an HDRI-map. In the scene above, I assume that the second render would be less grainy if BB would not use an environment sphere, but just that couple of polygons you can see through the window. In addition, the scene would have been even more grainy if there would be a light emitter (not nessesarily a light, some prop with ambient in the shader is enough) outside the wall.

In Blender you have a way to "bake" the lighting. For certain parts which don't change in the render, like the ceiling and probably the walls, Blender will calculate a new texture which is used as a light source. The material of the wall or ceiling is changed to a light, shining with that calculated texture. This won't work for the floor, since you won't get shadows on the floor then, it won't work if someone is close enough to the wall to shadow it. But if you stay within the limits, this baking will allow you realistic renders in very little time. The game industry uses it all the time, since there is no way to calculate ambient light in real time yet, as far as I know.

And thanks BB to explaining everything much clearer than I did. Great work as always.

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.