Don't worry, I do understand. Believe it or not we're looking at different ways of working around the same thing.
As it is I achieved the result that I was after using the above solution, and I thought it would be better to document it than to leave the thread hanging. I'm sure we've all read down a forum thread, to read "I found a solution...", without any further explanation of what that solution was.
So I'm all good for now, and I'm definitely looking forward to Octane 3 (particularly support for OpenVDB).
Cheers,