Midphase
While I agree with you that you shouldn't give money to Maxon, I think you're missing out by not considering 3rd party render engines. The entire industry works on them, and I like to believe that they have done their research and determined that it is the best solution.
I actually even switched from C4D physical renderer to Redshift recently during a production because the internal, heavily neglected physical renderer was getting slower by the minute. I`m with you regarding the research and stuff but I`m just fed up dealing with the hassles of checking if the DCC`s version is compatible with the version of the renderer AND the render farm I`m using. This is not a fictional case, it happened in the above project. I just think that any DCC vendor should have an up to date production renderer so they don`t end up like Arnold or Redshift, which now are in the hands of a competitor of Sidefx (or Autodesk or Maxon).