I feel your pain really I do . But I actually find daz Iray much faster than firefly or superfly when rendering at sizes at 1080 dpi for HD animation. if fact I found daz faster as a whole than poser pro for creating and rendering animation. , But i think it the productions speed has alot to do with what the artist are use to working with. I've been making poser and daz animations over a little over 10 years so both are very good in my book. But i favor daz over poser. because its so much easier to work with with greater results .

I started out with poser for animations. but found daz so much easier for animation that i almost completely use daz for animation now daz and just make gif with poser..

But you can always use Maya with vray , and use the Daz to Maya plugin to get genesis8 into maya But Maya =$$$ & Daz=free. You could get the Reality Plugin to render with daz with but its not much fast than iray. Its still has good results , but not any faster. , I tried lost of software. UE is about the fastest to render daz characters with but getting them into any game engine takes some work.

The fact is when it comes to making animation either with poser or daz & if you want to use daz genesis 8 for assets for animation, its going to take patients to render it . no way around it . I can get my renders to about 11 seconds a frame with a 11 gig 1080ti gpu so it can be done.

if you want to see what can be done with daz you can see 100's of animated short I made with it on my youtoube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/IvySummers