Thanks for the kind words! I come from the same programming background, but I have some experience with the visual side of things. Learning DAZ3D was one of the harder things to do. Apart from having a complicated GUI, making good renders is a challenge in itself. Lighting scenes is one of the biggest struggles.
For now I'm only using DAZ to create the characters and environments and render them in the built-in Iray engine. Switching to Blender is tempting, but too much work at this point. Maybe for a future title. Blender is a far superior application, the load times alone would make it worth to switch, but it also provides much better support for manipulating 3D models and animations.
Creating the images and rendering them takes the longest by far, even with the beefy hardware I know own.
Hope that helps!