The advantage is only to have a full featured tool, the counterpart is that it's
slow (slower than Cycles, Yafaray for anything or even slower than Luxrender in
some scenes like those with Caustics)

Still, If you work on a big project with big numbers of duplicate objects that
you would rather place by script than by hand and you don't want your computer
to have to display them before they actually render, if on some of the shots /
area of the image, there's lots of effects such as volumetrics, subsurface
scattering, perfect spheres without polygons (Aqsis is another open source
renderer that can do that but not all the rest), etc. Povray can do it all,
while the afore mentioned open source renderers all have had issues with one or
the other features up to now.

The solid texturing capacities of povray are only very slightly superior to
Blender regarding the number of algorythm available. But for any organic
texturing that would need to be hand painted, POV-Ray is a pain, you have to go
through complex syntax to be able to map finishes, other than bump or diffuse
values. You cannot make tengeant space Normal maps.

The only reason to use a graphical 3D editor along with POV-Ray would be to take
advantage of both worlds, produce real work, with a lot of diversity and cover a
range of styles going from cartoon to photorealistic. People don't seem so
interested in that, since they don't contribute at all to Blender's POV-Ray
exporter :-P I guess they prefer to render spheres on checkered planes and look
down at graphically interfaced tools that would bring them more developers and
users.

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