I reluctantly gave up the fun Cycles testing and went back to the official release. However,  my spirits went up again soon as I started to put together the main elements of my interior scene and the first lighting setup gave a promising result:

I used the reference photo as a background image so the “sky texture” in world settings -> Environment lighting would cast some colors into the scene. I don’t know if this is the best thing to do but I liked the result more than the white sky option:

I wanted to “see the light” first as an encouragement before the tiresome job of modelling 🙂