Just to add something about the 36 lights etc… one of the nice things IMO is how lux’s light groups allow any amount of lights to be in each light group, so if I have 6 down lights, they are all one group et …
Is easier than trying to use a separate pass per light or similar, and would be a good feature in Cycles.
Im glad im not the only one of a handful who thinks so. I might bring this to the blender developer forums attention soon.
light groups/passes are useful for animating the lighting too -like lights switched on and becoming brighter in a room.
I can elaborate. The math is calculated the same sure, the way other objects react to the light is very similar, ill be it, but yet, in lux render, bright objects come out white wite with an almost haloing effect, cycles comes out almost dim, and lunlike lux, if one light gets brighter, the whole scene gets brighter, where lux uses the camera settings so the exposure stays the same.
That depends on which tonemapper you use. Luxrender has multiple ones, the default being an adaptive Reinhard tonemapper, but there’s also the option for linear tonemapping just like in Cycles.
Technically, Luxrender and Cycles should produce more or less the same result when outputting to an EXR. You can always use the compositor or an external tonemapper to achieve the desired result.
You must have some misunderstanding here. The “blown out” aspect (which is inevitable with linear tonemapping in Cycles) is exactly what non-linear tonemapping like Reinhard solves. It lets you compress the dynamic range so that it fits within what your display is capable to reproduce, while still retaining a somewhat balanced contrast. This can yield a “washed-out” look.
The “adaptive” part of this is just changing the parameters depending on the image brightness, but you can always manage it yourself.
As for the original question: Why not just have different sets of lights on multiple RenderLayers and then composite them back together?
anyway, Before this becomes an all out debate, I find luxrenders materials look more photo real than cycles right out of the box and can look even more real with tweaking, cycles looks plasticy, and can be tweaked to look real. Just my opinion.
If cycles COULD get a reinhard non linear node that would be awesome.
and as stated, reinhard with lamp groups would just be bad ass
I would hope that luxrender looks more real, as it is physically accurate. You can’t get more real than physics 
Are you trolling? Blender have plenty of tone mappers, much more flexible and programmable. It called Compositor.