1/ Poly for poly Vue is faster rendering, Thing is the people generally create more complex scenes in Vue than in bryce so that sort of balances them out. Vue is by far faster though.

2/ Seconds to I think the longest render I ever did took 5 days maybe. It took a long time. It was sort of a test to see how far I cold push Vue. I think it has 178 million polys and about 300 lights. Try that in Bryce. That's on a 500 Mhz machine. My average on a 1 Ghz machine is less than a hour for most. (1280 X 1024) Oh I like eye candy so I always push everything to the max. I couldn't even consider making such a complex scene in Bryce. Bryce would never function with that amount of lights and polys. That's not terrain and trees, that was a space scene I did and it was the space ship. I've even beat that though now but that's a secret. I haven't released the renders yet. They where better made scenes and it rendered in about 6 hours max on a gig machine. You would not even get such a scene to even open in Bryce let alone render it. I have to watch opening it up in Vue. It's too big to work on now you have to work on it in different scenes then import them.
FYI it swapped over 800 meg to the swap file before it started to render and it still used 480 megs of memory.
You could not probably get that scene to load on a typical windoz box. I used a custom written version on a purpose built computer.

Vue is a much better program than Bryce. It's industrial strength. It can do a lot with very little bother. It could take a bit to get use to though. It makes sense though and it's very easy to learn.

I think only skies get exported to Lightwave when you have the pluggin