CYCLES / Network render - Linked groups don't work

Hi,
I’m begging someone to help me find a workaround here or at least give me a direction of where should I look for the solution. It’s super important to me…

Recently I decided to use Cycles and Network render. It seams as such a powerful combo. But after few tests a serious core issue came into view which makes the whole system completely unusable for me. Linked assets simply don’t render. They’re not linked in the scene. It’s empty.

All the linked assets are characters therefore I absolutely have to have them linked in the scene, not appended. I’m this close to re-do my assets for Blender Internal and change completely my well-planned rendering pipeline (well maybe not that well-planned as I’ve been oblivious to this issue up till now :confused:).

I’ve been doing some search and it appears it’s known and still open bug https://developer.blender.org/T36469

But maybe it can be done somehow, there is a great chance I’m just ignorant to some basic common understanding of networking rendering which could help me to get around this problem, so I turn to you guys… who know Blender, Cycles and Network render certainly better than I do.

My solution: I will use backup application for scenes/frames exchange between render machine and workstation rather than the network render add-on. Instead of sending jobs I will send the whole project (only up to date scenes and assets of course) to the render machine. Run the renders there and after frames are done I will sync it with the project on my workstation.

Plus #1 - I will get the benefit of multiple output files from blender compositor (multiple render layers) which wouldn’t be otherwise possible with network render.

Plus #2 - I get to use CPU and GPU in parallel at the same time this way.