This is why I still use my stand alone workflow... exporting alembic files. Maya's interface for material assignment has always been terrible. piggy backing off of that rather than integrating or linking to the octane interface is mind blowing and lazy I think.
The only thing the plugin is good for is it's alembic exporter. although, it needs to export the frames properly (it starts on frame 0 and for some reason octane doesn't want to render frame 0 with batch render). This also messes with workflow since you have to remember... 1=0, 5=4, etc.
I know others might disagree.. but knowing what it takes to develop something, I'd love to see 2 pipelines... one that keeps this updated for compatibility so those who subject themselves to this "workflow" can keep moving... a second which totally rejects this mess and rebuilds from the ground up. This should begin with a outline of objectives which we are brought in on to discuss and give feedback before development (coding) begins. Start with the UX/UI objectives rather than wasting time coding something that will be as frustrating as the plugin is already. In addition... hire competent designers/coders to make this happen at the level it should.
The plugin by itself is $269. I bought my own copy for testing when it was in the beta days and keep it up to continue to test it to see if its something worth my company getting. I can not justify buying this to my boss currently for our machines. It simply slows down our processes and gets in our way.