Yep, if you play around with the settings and materials you can get some decent renders out of it, but it's not as cool to work with as I'd hoped. Antialiasing isn't a strong point of this renderer, and noise is something that shows up a lot, requiring heavy sampling to clean up, indeed, there was noise that I couldn't get rid of at all.
I'm disappointed to say that my week working with LW 2018 was a week I could've been working with Blender, and having said that, I think that ends it for me and LightWave.