2016 — Blender Internal. Blender Render was better than Cycles. SSS and AO in Cycles stopped working. They're broke. I have to suck it up and carry on with 2.8 and Cycles. I owe a great deal for this project to "Realistic 3D Portrait" and so when are you going to redo that series in 2.8, Kent Trammell?
On watching parts of Jonathan Lampel's "Fundamentals of Digital Lighting in Blender" I've now realized that I just didn't know what the _ I was doing with Cycles and AO & SSS. Blender has come a long way; that "bloom" feature in Eevee is really cool