The good news is that these are all things that can be fixed. The bad news is that, until they are, I won't be a Max plugin customer. And if things don't turn around, I won't be an Octane customer anymore in general. There are other renderers, backed by companies who make it clear that rendering ...

Complete 3rd party procedural data has to be built on top of a live shader compiler - which will be introduced first through OSL in Octane.
This means yes? :)
If I'm not mistaken, this means "you'll be welcome write your own procedurals in Open Shading Language". Or get them from a third party.

Not for nothing but even Vray RT has caught up and surpassed Octane, and renders much faster. It's a real shame, Octane has such potential but lack of 3dsmax needed development, and not enough or very slow forum support makes it almost impossible to rely on Octane for a production environment. I ...

If OSX supported OpenCL (i.e. not the DOA 1.2 version they are now killing off), we'd be done already. The CUDA cross compiler works great since it compiles to AMD IL using the low level APIs exposed on Windows and Linux. But Apple does not allow that API on OSX.

Apple is very clearly forcing us ...

Yes. Zero GPU means the GPU can be on another box over LAN, with no render GPU needed on the local machine running Max/Maya.
But you can do this already with any remote control software.
What's the difference in using TeamViewer for example? I can work perfectly from home with my iPad controlling ...

It seems with OTOY there is never a shortage of new roadmaps. All the ambition of a startup still without the self-control and deliberateness of a stable business model or a company with clear focus.

I check back in every once in a while to see how Octane Render has progressed and to see if I will ...

That's rather disappointing. I wish there was a way it could be better.
Me too. Setting Caustic Blur and GI Clamp to 1.0 helps get rid of fireflies, but I doesn't seem to effect the type of noise we're talking about. The only thing's I can think of that don't involve changing your scene would be ...

A weak area of Octane is specular highlights on out-of-focus surfaces, unfortunately. Ways around it are the obvious things like increasing DoF, framing the shot to avoid highly reflective surfaces near the camera, or rendering Z-depth pass adding DoF in post.

I've seen it done with a base geometry form and then the rest with the material. You could use a dense "chips" noise in bump for the bubbles, add a bit of SSS and reflection, and a small gradient for transparency at the bottom of the foam to blend into the beer.

of course AMD is faster for OpenCL but what we don't know(yet) is how fast OpenCL will be for rendering comparing to CUDA
Exactly, and also whether every feature / code hack that works in CUDA will work in OpenCL. I wouldn't be surprised to see an initial Octane release that had a limited feature ...