Toucan might be better renamed to “Dodo” as it’s future is limited. Please see this post if you haven’t already.
If you have invested time and energy in Toucan, it will be in the WIP for awhile (although it might be hidden, we’ll make sure you can enable it). That said, it’s very much obsolete, so I would recommend shifting to another rendering engine that meets your needs. RhinoRender may or may not meet your needs. Which brings us to…
Will I be able to do the same things with Rhino Render in version 5A723 as I have been able to do so far with Toucan Render?
The Rhino Render in version 5A723 WIP is buggy (no surprise there). We’re working on fixing those bugs. That said, we don’t know if RhinoRender will be able to do all the things you have been able to do in Toucan Render so far…that depends on what you’ve been able to do. But perhaps that’s unfair to the spirit of you question… RhinoRender is not meant to be nearly as “Render Nerdy” as Toucan…as you likely experienced when you said:
as a beginner the Toucan render has been very confusing to me.
This is precisely what we want to avoid with Rhino Render. We want to provide an easy, intuitive, compatible, and quick renderer in Rhino for Mac. Keep in mind: we are also working hard on an SDK that will give the rendering pros the tools they need to develop amazing 3rd-party renderers for Rhino for Mac.
Since I am on the subject, my render skill are way inferior to my modeling skills. Is there a place online where I can get some pointers for using toucan Render and/or Rhino Render?
RhinoRender is way too new to even be documented properly yet. That’s still a Work-In-Progress. If I were you, I would not invest anymore time in Toucan. We apologize if we haven’t communicated well about this issue. Your time is not wasted as you’ve likely learned quite a bit about rendering that will be transferable to other engines.