Povray: what's it good for?

I was asked to give a talk on povray.  I got a question from the audience for
which I would love to have someone who is more artistically talented and more
computer-adept to give a short paragraph answer, an answer I could include in a
talk if I were ever to give one again.


You may know by now that I love using povray's abilities to make procedurally
generated things, and that stylistically I love shooting for the "left hump" of
the Uncanny Valley Curve.  (Using a quantum physics analogy, I'm sure I am
instead in a resonance tunneling state between the far left plains of the curve
and the UV itself, in my own artistic work.)

I showed them some of the images in the Hall of Fame, and gave them all great,
unconditional praise. Then I showed them some of my own animation work, and said
it was great fun. I explained about some of the HOF work involved using external
modelers.  Then came a question from the audience:


----
Q: "If you need to take meshes from an external modeler into povray, what
benefit is there over doing that instead of just rendering the image directly in
the external modeler?"
----

I said I didn't know. and might have mumbled the word radiosity. I said I liked
what the HOF guys did, and I liked having fun making my own things my way. (Not
that there's anything wrong with either.)  But what would you say is the best
technical answer to this question?   I'd love to have a paragraph I could just
paste into the next pres I ever make. I'm sure the answer is like, "Povray's
radiosity techniques are demonstrably better than ____ in ____ fashion." Again,
I'm not attacking povray, just want to make the full case of its power with
data.  (This is the sort of thing I was hoping for when I asked about "Speaker's
Notes" in p.g.)

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