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Matej has a lot of good points and I agree as well. Now, I am just looking at how Octane will really mature through time.
In comparison, Cycle has started in CPU based computing before moving into GPU. And with Blender api already laid, it has an advantage.
The same thing for Arion, from Fryrender-cpu based to a GPU. Vray also started in CPU before going into GPU.

If you think of all the fully featured renderer, they have a cpu based api, about Octane, it really started in GPU itself using CUDA.
The team could have some quite difficulty at times but nobody knows.

Yes, as a user we really want a lot of features from a renderer in comparison to what we are all used to doing with our previous favorite renderer, for me i think that we just have to give octane a time to fully mature like Vray or any other fully-featured renderer.

If I may again compare Octane & Cycles...:

The first versions of Cycles, while quite basic in shading & rendering functionality, already had fundamental things laid out. The subsequent releases kept adding advanced functionality and building on a good shading / texturing basis. Octane OTOH, got advanced stuff like SSS shader already a year ago, but you still can't do such basic things as transforming texture UVs or using generated coordinate sources...?? Cycles had the benefit of being built on an existing framework, but still... I hope we wont need to wait for the next paid Octane version, to get this basic functionality debated here.

...and rant a bit more:

Another small but sometimes annoying thing in "texturing workflow" is that Octane has no distinction between "images" & "textures". In other software you load some image (parent datablock) from which you can then derive an arbitrary number of textures (child datablocks). In Octane you "load the image" each time you need the texture. You can copy-paste the texture node, but that is not the point here - the point is that texture nodes are separate individual references to the image file. If some image appears as a texture five times in your project and you would want to replace it, you'll have to manually replace it five times (search for it through your materials and probably miss that 6th occurrence you forgot about...), instead of replacing it once - at the "image node" source. Replacing / overwriting the source file is not a solution, because you can potentially break some other project that uses this image file.

Many such little things then make the workflow a bigger pain that it should be.

Besides all the visual improvements that the devs are preparing for us right now (which we love and are grateful for! ), I think some fundamentals about texturing / shading workflow will need to be addressed ASAP. That old thread I posted earlier should be a useful starting point to set up a todo list for improvements (many experienced users shared their ideas).

I think a better way to put it is that Cycles had this type of functionality before cycles ever existed. It has nothing to do with cycles, it's a Blender (and any other modeling package) feature. Can't really compare the two.

I guess the logic behind getting things like SSS before basic UV controls is you can use your modeling package to do this, it's a pain with the back and forth, but it is there, but you wouldn't be able to do SSS unless Octane implemented it. So, the way they have been developing things makes sense to me.

If the choice is between a feature that is not currently possible and a feature which I can already do, even if it is a pain, I will choose the new feature.

That being said, we do need these controls to insure our time isn't wasted while working and hopefully we get them soon.

Ahhhh, the torture of growing pains!

I thing everybody in this forum loves rendering and animation. It is a kind of art. We all are together in the same line - we love to play around, experiment and see new fantastic results. Animations that took 2 years ago 2 days are now finished in 3 hours on a good rig and in a breathtaking quality.

But......in my opinion you have here 2 fronts. The one where it is passion, art, playing, hobby - and the other where you have to meet deadlines, make money and do business.

I like to play in octane - at least nothing is wrong with that little price it costs (now). But if i do now my renders in other render engines, i am about 3 or 4 times faster than in octane. Don´t get me wrong - octane is MIGHTY....but it takes too long at the moment to set up scenes and set lights. Keyshot may not reach the quality of octane, but renders go out within minutes in a quality that lets my customers be so happy, that they wanna take the pictures i made home and hang them on the wall. Setting lights in Keyshot with HDR Light Studio is done in minutes and the results are simply fantastic.

I love octane for its new thinking, for the price and for using my gpu´s. But to be honest i just baught it for my 3ds workflow and some advanced animation i wanna play with. If you wanna have a REAL high end render result - vray is still the best - but a render in vray takes 5 hours which in octane takes 40 minutes with much more flexibility - but the final result is still a LOT better in vray.

So you see.....there are a lot pro and cons. In my opinion octane is nice to play and for quick fun renderings and interresting if you have time to do experiments. But when you are a business like me and if you have to deliver about 3 to 4 designs A DAY.......octane is not ready at the moment.

The team knows what is necessera to have a quick and good workflow - we told them many times. It seems they don´t listen OR....think differnet then me (us).

Make UV and Textures easy to implement and editable
Applying Materials - absolutely no go so far. A mouse click solution (alt+left mouseclick for example) must be built in. Nodes are mighty - but at the moment, applying Materials is much to slow.
make photographer Values. In Phatography Aperure 1 should be aperture 1 in octane - expose 1/100 should be 1/100 - DOF and Aperture - everything should be meassured like in Photography. In Other Programms, any person who does photography lik me, knwos how to handle a DSLR. Its easy to control a picture with this. These strange numbers are just confusing.
HDR Light Studio Plugin for settings lights easy and fast
Better Ability to handle Material Library. Very user unfriendly if you wanna work without Live database.

and many many points more -

Octane is nice - but not ready to do business with it. My opinion!

Kind regards Chris!

i agree mostly too cfrank.
to add is, i also think the node approach comes to its limits somewhen.
its nice with a small scene with some materials, but with huge setups it gets more confusing than helping me graphically to find things.
my hope lies in the c4d integration, and hope all mapping problems/options are solved with that too.