Oh definitely! So much easier now. After Rendition we did another version called Spraytrace which tried to force mental ray into more of a pathtracing type mode

Oh definitely! So much easier now. After Rendition we did another version called Spraytrace which tried to force mental ray into more of a pathtracing type mode of operation, (eliminating ray branching, rather than light transport) by faking the mental ray api return values, and overlaying our own sampling. It worked, but was rather a hack. God knows why we didn't just see the writing on the wall, and write a path tracing renderer. :-)