Hi Paul,
35mmdelux said:
Initially I was an admirer of the 40VC lens. Fast and inexpensive. [...] I followed the 40VC threads for a couple years. After some time I began noticing very harsh boke in low light pictures. Not the subjective stuff, but harshness that a blind woman could see. Very harsh, and some downright ugly. [...] My opinion changed as a result of discussions around fotos with RF shooters with far more experience than mine. I was willing, able, and ready to buy but my research indicated that the lens would not meet acceptable boke standards for me.
Forgive me, but were you an admirer only, or a user as well?
I think one really has to see whether a particular lens' rendition is suited to one's own style of photography. Bokeh is a rather subjective and elusive thing, and judging bokeh from other people's comments on scanned, postprocessed, downscaled 640x480 pictures posted on the Internet is not the best way to influence a lens buying decision. If that's the only point weighing against it, better try, buy and sell again if needed. I certainly wouldn't comment on the Internet with a definite opinion on the bokeh of a lens I've never used.
Personally I've found that my bokeh preferences sometimes differed significantly from what photographers on internet fora said. For example (I keep repeating myself) I use medium format a lot. By internet standards the best bokeh lens I own in medium format should be a 180 Sonnar, and its bokeh is indeed fine, I think, but the bokeh I like best is actually that of a lowly Soviet Vega-12 90/f2.8 lens. Nobody on the Internet apparently uses that lens at all, let alone would have said a positive thing about its bokeh; I stumbled across it completely by accident and fell in love with it because of a single portrait shot I made. (I don't have a scan here, sorry.) Since as a photographer I first want myself to like my pictures, I tend to guide myself by my own preference on my own pictures, not what others write about somebody else's pictures.
I'm interested in the 40 Nokton because it's compact and fast and has a nice focal length. I've seen ugly and beautiful pictures from it, just like with any other lens. In that it's really no different from the 35 Summicron that everybody calls the "King of Bokeh" (apparently because having a red dot for a crown, it has to be king of something). I certainly won't be forming my judgement of the lens based on this kind of third-party opinion only.
35mmdelux said:
You'll need to judge for yourself.
Exactly.
Philipp
EDIT: Corrected some spellings.