Artao,
only in a fraction of the time did Octane render produce a high amount of better renderings than years following Blender.
If you only had initial problems with BI then maybe you do not need functions which are essencial for our tasks and which render Blender Internal for certain jobs not an option at all.
That is not a secret as even Ton states that.
Blender can produce very results for what it is intended to do and how far coders were able to improve it given the restrictions they had (time, money, man power)
But in the whole scheme of render jobs Blender can do many things VRay can do, however VRay can do more than Blender can do. Simple as that.
In terms of non realistic rendering Blender is pretty good in terms of GI rendering Blender has nothing serious to offer because you hit limitations instantly.
Why do you guys always talk about Renderman? VRay, MentalRay, Air, all those are terrific engines and very simple to use. Setting up a material in Max or Maya with VRay is equal to Blender Internal.
Not much more complicated at all.
@ Leone
C4D and others all have a force of paid programmers working the render engines.
Developing such a system takes time and money, both Blender Foundation does not have at that rate.
In addition effective and modern render engines are quite a challenge to design.
Blender as an open source software needed first to make a recovery from the paid product to open source and with the following open movie projects point by point where tools programed the artists needed for those jobs - mainly compositing, modeling, interface, and animation tools.
Rendering was on the list as well, but because of the complexity of that and the need of fast rendering only options were followed which were doable and needed for such a movie project.
This is the reason why Blender in many areas has very outstanding tools, from smoke simulation, to particles, to a terrific 3d compositing system, to a quite powerful animation system, but compared to other render engines a rather outdated and feature lacking system which unfortunately if you want to go only with Blender can quickly be the bottle neck in Blender.
However since the evolution of 2.5 Yafaray a free OSS GI engine as well as other and commercial engines such as VRay are being actively now integrated into Blender.
This way you can model, texture, and animate with Blender but render out with a more powerful system.
This is something I am very looking forward to me since Ton confirmed that Blenders Internal cannot catch up without any magical help and VRay as I own it is a terrific render module.
Blender in that instance is then just the modeling host.
However this is also the same with many other commercial products.
Maya uses external render modules
3DMax uses external render modules
Maya can use MentalRay, VRay, 3Delight, Renderman, or its silly build in engine.
And nobody has a big issue with that.
So to be honest I would not focus to much on the issue of Blenders Internal engine being drastically outdated but rather see Blender as a free platform you can use to feed other external engines and do honestly what the industry is doing anyway.
In that light it doesnt really matter that BI is just not that good anymore.