move/scale/rotate is planned for the beta3 in the near future.
This has been real concern for me as well. Good to know it's coming. Will this also work for meshlights?

Will there ever be extra viewports to help with this? It's much easier to move things in one view while seeing the results in ...

Shaderlight uses voronoi cells instead of pixels in the early stages of the rendering and FPrime and Holomatix Rendition also has some similar scheme. Compared to the dark dotted noise that you get from unbiased renderers and pixel mess from other progressive types (eg. modo), I think the ...

I'm not too concerned about comprehensive integrations myself, specially if octane will have some basic scripting. It would be quite laborious to do it in multiple apps.

But it just occurred to me that none of the videos I've seen so far show any object or light translations happening. Does octane ...

At this early stage I think it makes sense to pick one that is easier to implement. Anything is better than .obj really and not all apps support rib.
Personally I value functionality more than openness, so if fbx gets the job done more fluently than collada, then fbx it is. And vice versa of course ...