Ironsoul; I'm in your camp. I've said it before and I'll say it again. An artist (or most any other profession) is only as good as his ability to master his tools. The best watercolour artist on the planet may be a complete failure with oils. Is it the fault of the brush? Is it the fault of the paint? Is it the fact the artist is a hack? No, it means he needs more practice and theory on how oil paint reacts with his canvas/backing board of choice. Firefly, Superfly, iRay, 3Delight; Arnold, Octaine; and the band played on. Which is the best? Which is abject crap? Answer depends more upon which render engine the person normally uses than anything else. Oils, water colours, tempra, gauche, and all the rest are just ways to express yourself. Render engines are no different than paint. Learn what to expect from your paint and how to correctly apply it and you can paint a masterpiece or a bedroom wall. It's down to skill at that point.

BTW I haven't touched Firefly in a couple of years now. I saw the advantages to a PBR workflow a long time ago when it comes to cross platform rendering and repeatedly showed images from Superfly and iRay challenging viewers to identify which was which. The maps I produce in Substance can go directly to either engine and with the same HDRI environment there is no real way to discriminate between them.

A lot of folk that don't like Superfly haven't tried it. A lot of folk complaining of long render times have not used a modern version of Poser. Those that complain that their video card is not supported for Superfly renders are not trying CPU renders. The number of missing nodes from Cycles can be counted on one hand with fingers left over. The biggest complaint is no Colour Ramp like in Firefly or Cycles. That node is reproducible with a lot of add clousure nodes chained together and dropped into a compound node. That is Earl's and other's complaint along with compound nodes that expand to off the screen so they have to scroll the screen to see the entire shader. Not sure how that is a Superfly issue. Has nothing to do with the render engine.