Wow, this sounds sweet.

Hopefully the DOF, diffraction, mabye even motion blur ect. works alongside the bloom/HDR. Hopefully each graphical feature will be standalone as well, that way a user can easily implement it in their projects without all the menu code, templates, other entities(terrain) overhead that Sphere2 had. A problem I've had with Sphere 2.0 is that everything seems connected, and it's quite hard to implement different graphic/fx features in my project. I've tried implementing the water for example, but it's connected with the terrain, a couple other functions with much in them, and I couldn't seem to figure out where the rendering for refraction/reflection is from.

Also, know when you might be done this new plugin?

btw - Your right about the render-to-texture not being as great.