There is a poll at the Thea render forum where people can show interest in support for integration of Thea Render into various apps (you need to be registered on the forum to vote):
http://www.thearender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=112&t=15639&start=20
I have used Thea for various poster images but it would be great to be able to use it for animations in Maya also. It is a pretty interesting program as it has lots of different engines, ranging from a MLT style engine to an irradience caching engine with its own unique approach to getting good results with multiple bounces. There is also a GPU engine which also leverages the CPU, plus a MLT style engine which is biased (faster).