Working with archviz, I have 3 big problems with Octane (besides the non-mayan plugs) that I wish for improvement:
1. maya like triangulation: the need to triangulate my geometry every time I'll do a render then revert the triangulation to continue working on clean geometry is a hassle.
2. viewport material appearance when working and making changes (specially transparency for windows)
3. exporting materials with plugged textures and color parameters for other packages
The thing is: Octane renders are never the only output of my projects. Specially now with VR. Often I send the project to Unity or Unreal. But exporting FBXes with Octane Materials they go all gray. It's hard to manage that. I wish the FBX could go plugged with the basics parameters like blinns that even embed textures on the FBX.
The best thing would be a WYSIWYG viewport shader for the Octane Material, but I get that materials are kinda like oranges and apples between different renderers.
So a reasonable workaround Vray and mentalray have for a long time are "material overrides" in the shading group or the materials (kinda like Octane's current approach to camera settings in Maya). I can have a material that Maya handles well (like blinn or even a shaderFX) plugged in the regular surface shader, and I plug the 3dparty shader for the renderer as an override in the attributes of the shading group or material. This way we would stay less miserable when someone would request modifications to the projects and be able to iterate faster.