Look, about the whole 3-point thing. I've been working on my own game now for almost 6 months now, and I will say this about it, you don't need it. However, you need to understand why it is to CONSISTENTLY create good renders. I could work on one poster render for days to fine-tune it, but that's impractical for a VN. This is why I'll keep telling people to read up on photography and cinematography standards. This isn't just an artistic thing, it's for practical reasons too. The better handle you have on it, the fast and more efficiently you can render good images. This isn't like drawing where you need months if not years of practice to be good at it. It takes a few hours of reading and watching, and then a couple of practical applications to see the results.
Like I said before, you don't even need three lights, two is plenty enough. Think of the time you save from having to set up three lights vs. two over hundreds if not thousands of renders. But to actually make good use out of just two lights takes a little bit of reading up on how lighting works. In a VN, a scene would involve different camera angles, so if you want the lighting to make sense with the environment for every angle, it needs to be planned out and set up properly. How could one do that if they don't even know what setting up lighting even means?
Also, most people use premade environments anyway, they should all come with sufficient lighting for themselves, it only takes another light to expose the subject.
Now about the artistic vs. technical thing. I get it, I don't consider myself an artist either, but my point is about quality and efficiency, not anything artistic. Why do you think there's something wrong with your renders? Because they don't look right. And they don't look right not because you didn't tweak certain settings, or you don't know DAZ has this thing you need to use, etc. In my honest opinion, it is because it has no direction, or purpose if that's the word that makes more sense. Like your threesome render from before, if your goal for the render is to make sure everything is brightly lid, then jobs done, it is brightly lid. What else is there to say? The two new images are the same idea. Yes, the second one is faster, and slightly better because brightness makes more sense for the scene, so if that was your goal, you did it. I would say keep trying and you'll get better at the whole thing. But if you want to render something that looks right, don't you need to define what is right first? And if you don't know what is right, isn't that the crux of the problem?
Using my own experience as an example. I came into this knowing absolutely nothing about DAZ or 3D art in general. I never studied photography, I don't ever take photos on my phone, it's just wasn't me. Like you, I just wanted to tell my stories and I ended up choosing VN as the medium. And not being an artist, I chose DAZ because that's the only feasible way I could see myself being able to produce the visuals I'll need. I started off by setting goals for myself, I actually maintain a dev journal here, from day 1 to preset. For the first two months, it was all about learning. I had a goal for each day or week, and with a goal, I could see the puzzle I need to solve, then I just look up how to solve them.
Maybe pick a scene in one of your stories, and just try to render one shot of it. Like a POV shot of a character talking in a cafe or something, whatever you think fits with your story. As the writer, you'll see what's wrong with it, and you'll have more concrete obstacles to overcome. For example, when you try to render your character in the cafe, you'll notice the renders ended up very noisy despite hours of rendering and with 98%+ convergence. That's a problem to solve. Or when put your character into the scene, you'll notice the cafe's ceiling lights aren't good for the camera angle, because they're right above the character's head. That's another problem to solve. Keep solving these problems and your renders will look right soon enough.
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