Its been like a year since we got 3.0.
I bought Octane around that time for the innovation and advancement it had over a various amount of other render engines. But come 6+ months later, the only big thing we've had was adaptive sampling which hasn't honestly been that big of a feature for Octane as people expected huge results to show in time/noise.
Up until now we have had no notice of anything behind the scenes. We have heard bits and pieces about the delay with AMD or updates about the supposed integration and partnership with Altus Innobright.
And lastlY, as far as a personal experience. As a c4d user, I liked the fact that Octane had a better Material than most renderers, and probably one of the best looks. But I'm conflicted with the fact that even with 2 GTX 1080s I can't get my renders to be as noise free and as fast as what I can get from my native physical renderer. Octane looks much more realistic but Still falls short in memory usage optimization and time optimizations.
Not only that but Octanes materials like faking AO with the dirt shader or using mix materials to fake material stacking kinda just gets in the way of productivity and there hasn't been any move onto these ideas or concepts.
I feel we have been disconnected with the team for awhile and I hope that we can reach a mutual understanding of the things going on behind the scenes and what is planned for the future!
~Adrian