Quote - I wouldn't get too hung up on topology so long as render results are good.  I used to agonize over it until I studied the obj's of a bunch of (very nice) items I'd bought and realized that the people who made the items sometimes seemed to completely disregard the "rules" of "good modeling".  In some cases the mesh looked like a complete mess, but the items rendered just fine.

Yeah, but this could get you in trouble with some render engines interpreting smoothing and other issues in the topology different than others.  In most cases, if the render engine is the same kind as the one you are testing it in, it will render fine, but then you go and use a Path Tracing engine, or some other kind of engine with different lighting algorythms, and your "not so good" topology look bad suddenly.

Long, unsupported edges, Ngons, thin triangles, etc. all of these topology issues could give problems of self-shadowing and edge artifacts with an unbiased, physically accurate bidirectional path tracing lighting algorythm, but render just fine with interpolated photon mapping.  So your best bet is to ALWAYS model good topology for the best, most consistant results.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.