Gr100 - Are you serious ? If you want to work in the 3d industry you'll have to invest a lot of money in software and computers...It doesn't matter what package you use. Do you think that max\maya users pays less than us on computers and softwares ? If you want to spend as little as possible - go with blender
Money is not a problem my friend, we need softwares that work... Corona scatter ain’t the only problem with Corona.
It just sounds to me like someone needs to learn to optimise their workflow...
Multi-Instances do work (for me at least). They don't work in IR but I have been using them perfectly well in the VFB. There's a weird querk when using render Instances with motion blur, sending cloned AWOL but otherwise it's been fine. We are a studio of 7 artists, producing 7-10 projects per week, with hundreds of thousands of clones, massive amounts of vegetation in some scenes and we manage just fine. I can't applaud the Corona team enough. We had been using Vray for the past 11 years and switched to Corona during the early Beta release. Corona has revolutionised the way and speed at which we work.
I regularly peruse the forum and there are a lot of people bitching about seemingly small issues... this is one of them. Corona Scatter would be a lovely addition to the tool set. But we already have MoGraph Cloner and you could use Laubwerk SurfaceSpread... Both work brilliantly and efficiently.
If you're having trouble with viewport lag then that comes down to your workflow and scene optimisation. There are two simple solutions to this problem that spring to mind:
1 - you could establish your cloners (trees, grass etc) and once happy with the result, save in a separate temp file, then re-import for render. This keeps your scene light and test rendering fast.
2 - Add all your cloner groups to a layer and then simply turn off visibility and disable generators in the layer manager. This will significantly improve your viewport frame rate.
I have a wish list as long as my arm for many software applications, but things take time. However, we are currently in a place within the industry that is exciting and things are changing fast. Applications are becoming more synchronised and complimentary, just look at the developments in UE4, Substance, Quixel, as well as with Corona... A lot has happened in the last 2 years and i am really excited about the developments ahead.