The build doesn’t use any trick. The images converge to the exact same results.
Regarding AO, Evermotion uses it indeed if i remember correctly, but nearly all interior renders you see in the forum gallery do (go look in the thread if you want like here Archviz - Interior - Emily) and the Blender Foundation films uses it too (the Agent Movie has it, you can see it in the bench files). I’m from those thinking what counts is the mood. Non-biased rendering doesn’t exist anyway, reality is way too complex, even for today’s computer. So what counts is that your image is liked by it’s audience.
But again, this build doesn’t use any trick. The images converge to the same results.
About Eevee: I didn’t start to look at it as a coder yet. For me, it still crashes too much, I don’t find it that good looking in my use cases. It also needs manual tricks and lot of tweaking to compensate it’s nature, like in the Internal Render in it’s time. Cycles on the other hand can not only be extremely fast at rendering when configured wisely, but can also saves huge amount of user time by only needing 1 to 3 parameters to be tweaked per scene. GPUs are extremely cheap today after the mining boom. If you want to earn money with Blender, the GPUs are way cheaper than the human time, even more with the optimizations in this build. So even if Eevee would render 100x faster than Cycles, as long as it needs manual work, it just doesn’t make sense economically.
If you need real time, I find there are much better alternatives for real time rendering in the architechture field for now.
But it’s improving fast, so I keep an eye on it.
To all: You can just post here if you want to participate for fun, but to win a year, you have to send email (to get the coupon) and name (to check people don’t post 20 answers)