About rotating the dupli object... This may sound silly, but honestly I don't understand this either
Anyway, after some trial/error testing I found this helps when I want to set the initial rotation to Normal - which gives nice control over rotation randomness. I've never really given it much thought, but since it works, I keep repeating this solution in every project. With Grass Essentials you will get particle systems set up by proffessionals, so you can be sure about their correctness.
As far as I know, particles with dupli objects set as Scatter are VRAM-friendly instances for Octane, just like Alt-D duplicates. The scene transmission time might depend on total amount of particles, or it may have increased because I used "real" particles instead of children, or because I added another particle system to the scene. I'm not quite sure, maybe someone more experienced could explain this.
I'm afraid there is no option to automatically convert materials form cycles to octane. But usually for foliage a simple mix of diffuse and glossy shaders does the job (one image texture + a couple of color correction nodes to control diffuse, roughness, specular and transmission). One note - it is a good idea to group single leaf textures into one big image, just like Enrico Cerica did in his River Side project:
http://www.3dtotal.com/index_tutorial_d ... Y6NA_ntlBeCheers,
Szymon