Interesting question Thomas...
I guess you could say that I am interested in virtual photography, but with a more artistic feel to it. This being said, I could probably use a more mainstream renderer (and I have), but it's much easier to make artistic virtual photographs, if your source images are more photorealistic. I've used both Brazil and V-ray, and though I got familiar enough with Brazil, it was just too much of a pain in the butt to get any realistic lighting.
You have to keep in mind that this is a hobby for me - something to do in my spare time to relieve the stress from my real job. Since I don't have a lot of time to do this, ease of use is very important for me. This is what attracted me to MR initially - at least with the Alpha and Beta versions. I could work directly withing Max and could set up a scene very quickly with the lighting I wanted (lighting being the most difficult for me in the other programs).
As Maxwell has evolved, it has become much less easy to use (material wise), but it is still the easiest when it comes to getting realistic lighting - no playing around with 'photon samples' and bounces, and what not. I can spend half the time in MR than I would on one of the others to start a final rendering - just with the lighting features alone. Materials are still a pain, but if NL can get rid of some of the simple bugs (like opening back in the same directory you were before), I can deal with it. I'd still be happier if we still had the basic materials within our plugins. This is the part of the workflow that slows me down the most. It inturrupts my creative process, and forces me to spend a lot of time doing what should be a relativly simple task.
One other thing I appreciate with MR is the rendering window. With other renderers, you just get to see a little bit appear at a time (in bucket or scanline mode). With MR I can see the whole image at once emerge. It's a little thing, but it saves me a lot of time with my test renders.
So, the short answer is, I use MR because I still want photorealism - even though I may run it through the post-production ringer eventually, and I want a program that's easy and quick to use. Although I'm still not happy with the goat-rope you have to go through to create a simple texture, MR is still easier to use than the others.
"Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art." - Tom Stoppard
My modern art gallery at:
http://nws.carbonmade.com/
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