The DOF is indeed little bit strange acting. I also noticed the Halos at low thresholds (the ones you use for narrow lenses in Architectural photography), occasionally. But for shallow DOF it works perfectly. It's indeed like Frischluft, just better, if it didn't have this quirk.
Could have been the Filmic, it's much better at keeping local highlights without flattening everything to earth (like Reinhard very quickly does), and it also retains proper saturation. Reinhard instantly desaturates highlights to point that Sun doesn't even look like Sun.
Generally, with the discussion in how should the new Corona framebuffer be....I have no answer. VFB+ is exactly what I want, I do not want a poor copy of it, reinventing the wheel again. Vray 3.3 which looks almost identical proves this concept. Small, collapsable, with lot of tools that you can switch on and off.