For those unawayre of it, because I am lazy, I quote from their homepage:
http://www.alembic.ioAlembic is an open computer graphics interchange framework. Alembic distills complex, animated scenes into a non-procedural, application-independent set of baked geometric results. This ‘distillation' of scenes into baked geometry is exactly analogous to the distillation of lighting and rendering scenes into rendered image data.
Alembic is focused on efficiently storing the computed results of complex procedural geometric constructions. It is very specifically NOT concerned with storing the complex dependency graph of procedural tools used to create the computed results. For example, Alembic will efficiently store the animated vertex positions and animated transforms that result from an arbitrarily complex animation and simulation process which could involve enveloping, corrective shapes, volume-preserving simulations, cloth and flesh simulations, and so on. Alembic will not attempt to store a representation of the network of computations (rigs, basically) which are required to produce the final, animated vertex positions and animated transforms.
I think it would be the perfect way to circumvent hacky exporters. You could just export to alembic, even animations and render it in Octane.
While a tight integration into max/maya might be wanted and prolly will be developed by RS, this would make a standalone version a universal renderer.
RS could either offer and sell their own exporters or people could rely on community exporters.
Just some thoughts.
I was wondering if RS considered it, or will consider it, or if it is out of the question, or technically impossible.