@Grim Beefer :
I try to reply your comments :

I asked to V-Ray pro and addicted to try Mentalray, at first they don't like it because it's hard to get smaes quality as in V-Ray without adjusting parameters. So after they learned Mr a bit more all say that's Mentalray is more realistic render than V-Ray.
V-Ray is of course really faster in some case (MR glass is faster). Mr is in industries from 20 years, a bit more experience than V-Ray I guess.
In Film it's usually Mr and Viz and Arch.Design it's V-Ray, because V-Ray is easy to setup.
And last MR is populated and in each studio using max, maya, xsi (as you said), I experienced V-Ray is good for freelance, why ? Just try to send data to an others working relay studio or to your customers, if they don't install V-Ray and add.licence cost, no way to render! With Mr all is ok. it's this kind of industries points and pipeline who is important, the rest is blabla...

I only compared base package, because new user before buy highend, don't want spend his money without knowing exactly what's they needs,...of courses we all know maya have Ncloth, fluids etc...
If you work in Film studio, don't take care about this we know all how it's happend.

I don't know why so cry on Blender Interface, it's just one thing into the list.

In term of performance it's an others kind of article, I'm working on. The actual article is only done to SHOW to NEW CG ARTISTS what's softwares from based package they can try to fit their needs.
And for arbitrary in my articles, I can assure I worked on this with a lot of CG PRO in film and freelance from arch.viz, design, games, cg students...around the world, from Las Vegas Who's who awarded CG artists to France CG expert and Asia...I don't publish their name here to keep their anonimous, we can speack about in email if you want.
My 2 cents bla reply :-)
My best, Ben (Bsm3d)