Yeah, the Material view isn't great: It basically only works with Diffuse and Glossy, and it doesn't reflect material changes (nor texture transformations).
The Textured view is a bit more useful, when your texturing/UV-unwrapping, but still doesn't reflect any node based transforms etc for the texture.
I usually work in rendered view (in a smaller "window") when I'm shading.
For lighting you "have to" use "mesh lights" (planes etc).
There is (some) support for some of the lamp types:
- Point - Only as a "toon light"
- Sun - Used to control the sun in the Daylight environment (didn't get this to work, didn't put much effort in it..)
- Area - The default material wont work, you have to change it to a Octane Emission setup (A Diffuse Material and an Emission node)
If you want a spot light you can do it like this (In this case with an Area Light Object):
(Texture of a circle, set not wrap [Black color as "Border Mode"], connected to the Distribution of the Emission node, and with Perspective Projection*)
(*You could use "Normal Space" instead of "Object space" for the projection, but then you need to invert the texture in this case. Or you could use a proper IES Profile..)
The AI upsampler is only in the test version (2019.1.XB2 - 18.0) currently (sadly only for perpetual license holder, for now..). If you have that version you can find it in the camera settings (below the Denoiser settings)