More on the bigger issue:
I hope I'm not over-reacting here but here goes:

Like most who have used POV for many years, we rely on past examples rather than
having to reinvent the wheel each time from scratch. This is particularly true
since POV has evolved into a much more complex SDL - radiosity and photons and
media and other envelope-pushing features - that, while they expand the horizon
of possibilities, have also made it much more difficult to efficiently use.
There seems to be an almost infinite fiddling with parameters and tweaks and
coefficients to the point that it is all the more necessary, when trying to just
get something done, to merely borrow on some successful solution others have
found that just works. It is little wonder that beginners and accomplished
graphic artists like Gilles Tran have lost interest in POV as a workable,
practical tool. The addition of macros has helped some but it's gotten so
cumbersome even long-time users aren't sure what to do to get what they expect.
Does anyone else still miss "halo, for example, or MegaPov's "glow". Not
"technically realistic" perhaps but they got the job done.

But as it is now with 3.7, that's all out the window. I tried for example to
test Steve Gowers' famous "Bucket of Shells", which was originally created in
3.0 but still renders the same in 3.6. No matter what I tried, setting #version
3.0, #version 3.6, #version 3.7 with any and every possible Display_Gamma or
File_Gamma or assumed_gamma or gamma whatever, the results in 3.7 came out
dramatically different. There is in effect no practical backward compatibility
with the whole tradition of POV. And as for trying to tweak the lighting and
ambient and diffuse ad infinitum of every light source and color and finish
etc., etc., one might as well start from scratch. So while a good case has be
made that POV in the past was technically "wrong", is this more important than
how it is actually used. Whatever the technical issues, POV worked fine. It
played well with others. Images came out as expected on the web, in Photoshop,
on Macs and PCs and Linux. To just say that we were just doing it "wrong" all
those years for using assumed_gamma for artistic effect misses the point. Who
cares how we got there as long as we made it and it didn't take a week of
futzing around. I sometimes think, with all due respect for the enormous and
wonderful work the developers have freely put into it, that POV has lost sight
of the end-user who's out there not just to play with the dials and controls but
just to get something off the ground.

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