I know you've said you don't like Blender but you should put the time in to learn the interface. It is very powerful once you learn the hot-keys.

This is almost ancient history but this video is a good introduction to moving from Moi to Blender to Luxrender:

http://www.vimeo.com/4810249 He is moving too fast but you can see that it doesn't take that many steps to get to a workable render.

The biggest problem with that video now is that Blender has moved to 2.5 beta and the interface has changed. It is easier to learn now but that doesn't mean much to someone new.

Meanwhile Luxrender is starting to look amazing. It has been a very powerful renderer for a while but they are getting close to workable gpu rendering which is an order of magnitude faster than cpu rendering. Check out the real-time rendering in this video:

http://www.vimeo.com/14290797

Also look at this guy's animations using Blender, a physics engine and Luxrender -- http://www.youtube.com/user/Phymec

Crazy.

UncleC