For my own, I think that Octane's speed is one of the strong points that put in in good marketing position. Hybrid solutions seem to be much slower, and as an Indigo user, I left it because of Octane's speed.
Currently, I'm struggling with RAM/VRAM problems. I recently purchased two GTX 580 3GB, and as my system has only 8GB of RAM and can't host more, I think that on the opposite RAM usage should be minimized as much as possible, because currently I can't use much more than the half of my GPU memory (VRAM) because of the need of RAM to load the files...
So I think that any process involving more use of the RAM is a nail in the foot !

French Blender user - CPU : intel Quad QX9650 at 3GHz - 8GB of RAM - Windows 7 Pro 64 bits. Display GPU : GeForce GTX 480 (2 Samsung 2443BW-1920x1600 monitors). External GPUs : two EVGA GTX 580 3GB in a Cubix GPU-Xpander Pro 2. NVidia Driver : 368.22.