It’s just my opinion but… As a pretty new user of Blender, I never touched the BI because I knew Cycles was the future in term of realism.
For the “old” users I understand the importance of the BI, but for the new ones I think it’s better to save time and learn directly Cycles.
MichaelW,
The problem you are trying to solve could be handled much more transparently for the user (the rest of teh material properties change without issue when switching renderer, so why not have "use BI nodes as a new property for BI materials and “Use cycles nodes” as a new cycles material property… i’m sure updating old files may be problematic but easy to fix manually.
true, it is one thing that should be handled.
Current behavior where bi nodes appear in cycles node window is also bad. As well as current BI node creation (the node icon), should create a material, not an empty node.
+1 with rattle-snake !
I never use BI because I’m using Cycles and I learned Cycles.
BI is good as I can see, I don’t know if I will gain to learn BI for some renders, I don’t know if he is faster.
For the Ubershader it’s a great news !
I don’t Know if you know the Mattrm Ubershader, it’s really great !
I think they do because that is what makes or breaks lighting. I know I struggled with it and still struggle with it. The first time I put a light into a scene and everything in the shadows was black I couldn’t understand it. That’s not how lights work in the real world what the heck was going on here? It took a long time to learn about bounce lights, ambient occlusion etc and frankly I still think I’m learning, lighting in BI is not something that comes easy to me. I can handle something simple with a three point lighting rig for example but if you gave me something like one of the CGTalk lighting challenge scenes that would scare the shit out of me still.
Even something like soft shadows, how many settings are you messing about with. Not so much with ray tracing but let us say you are using buffered shadows tweaking those setting is a PITA. With cycles the softness or hardness of a shadow is a function of how small or large a light source is just like in real life.
ALL the articles I have read on studios switching to path tracing have one thing in common the vast simplification of lighting rigs that happens.
We have not decided yet how the ubershader will look exactly, I think it should be easy and not have too many controls. We will probably open a Design task on developer.blender.org once we start implementing it. Thanks for the link, will take a look.
Why not just leave all that alone? 
I’m assuming that the focus here is on new users, since that’s the whole point of defaults after all.
even with the uber shader, compared to BI, cycles would still be a lot more technical, a lot slower and too powerful for new users. After all there’s nothing a new user would want that BI can’t handle. Faster too we don’t want to exhaust the patience of the user, do we?
Most blender users come from video game or art backgrounds. If they’re from the gaming world, chances are they need mats that would bake and export easily and reliably. In that department, BI wins hands down.
Or maybe they just want to quickly tweak a material on a game asset without having to study all the nodes first.
If they are from the art world, they would meet BI the easy-to-use lightning-fast renderer.
When they’re experienced enough to know what GI is, then at their own pace, they could switch to cycles. And when they meet a barrage of technical stuff and issues, they know they asked for it.
I don’t know anyone that ever really needed the power of cycles while taking their first baby steps. So i still see no benefit of making cycles the default.
I’ve used blender for 2 years, and i’ve produced a lot of artworks. And only one or two were made with cycles. So cycles is not really as indispensable as most people think.
To summarize, if the user is experienced enough to know the advantages of cycles over BI, he knows how to change the render engine. But let’s not make it hard for those truly new users.
Cycles has been already my default render for a long time.
I teach Cycles for my studants and nerver BI.
I don’t miss uber-shader.
Well I don’t know, but I would assume a beginner likes to see a good looking result. Where is the benefit of having some easy UI to enable Glass/Glossy or whatever, just to find out that it looks worse than a 5 year old computer game? 
You can certainly achieve great results with BI, but you need to be much more experienced for that, than you would need to be for Cycles. And as others mentioned, physically based shading becomes the standard in all 3D software.
I have bunch of add-ons that rely on material name in the Material tab. If current default structure is removed, all my add-ons will break. And finding someone to fix stuff, even for a fee, has proven to be almost impossible. Let’s not create such circumstances, please.
I don’t understand why is it even on the agenda. What’s the big deal leaving BI alone, and just having default renderer as Cycles? How is it different from what Blender has now?
+1 with Dingto, cycles is simpler than BI and BI is an old renderer.
When cycles will be faster, BI will not have any interest.
In my opinion, we could improve cycles to be simpler, with ubershader, with render presets, infinite plan etc.
People love renderer like keyshot because it’s simple, just have to put the model, choose the IBL and chosse shaders, change color etc.
It will be great that Cycles will be like that for fast renders.
With node and preferences, we could go as far as we want, but for a simple render, we have a lot of work to do before start the rendering.
No one is changing or removing BI motorsep…
Ahh, that’s cool then 
What I like in Cycles is the way it forces you to understand and control its logic. BI material is just a bunch of buttons to control lots of hacks to mimic what light does over surfaces. Cycles leeds you to plan and implement whaterver you need in terms of shaders. It turns newbies into real shader’s programers. And it does it quiet easy.
Just love Cycles. Just need it.
yes, i don’t argue that everyone’s doing it. i just don’t see how the pros outweigh the cons. yes, realism is easier to achieve in cycles, but the level attainable by BI (with little or no experience) is more than reasonable. My sketchbook shows some of my first ever BI renders. I’d say they came out pretty great! my first cycles render however was a different thing. I spent close to an hour in GIMP smudging out fireflies.
Not everyone has a mega nvidia beast in their machine. with a lot of machines, 10000 samples is not an option. “good looking result” shouldn’t be a noisy render.
in my view, making cycles default will only make an already very steep learning curve even steeper and more branched.
@pitiwazou, cycles is NEVER going to be faster than BI
Reading your posts, I get the impression that you don’t know Cycles very well. You should learn how a pathtracer works, maybe this helps: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Reducing_Noise
And yes, Cycles is already faster in some situations. Enable GI in Blender Internal, soft shadows, lot of glossy reflections, volume… Then we talk.
@DingTo
Lol that’s not a fair comparison at all. Both renderers can easily be crippled.
Thanks for the link, though i’ve read that before. See now that cycles adds more confusion to an already confused new user?
Light bounces, falloff, filter glossy, fireflies… a game asset doesn’t need any of those.
The first tutorial i followed was the beachball tutorial in Blender Noob To Pro. If they had bombarded me with all those scary stuff, i would probably have quit right then without exploring the less technical sides of blender.
And i do know cycles very well. my profile pic was made with cycles took hours just to get 200 samples or so at 50% of my preferred resolution. i experiment a lot with cycles’s features, but when it comes to art, i wanna focus on the art and not the waiting or the noding or the technical stuff. it takes the fun out of making art. with BI, even my most complex characters take less than 8 hours in general (modeling, rigging, posing, rendering and compositing). With cycles, i spent almost a week on my monkey. I never got around to giving him a full render.
I’m not afraid of technical stuff. i’ve even written a few addons and scripts. But when it’s time for art, i want my work to be as streamlined as possible.
Try asking a non-blender person to make adjustments to the cycles materials of the default cube and just watch. Perhaps ask them to make it transparent or reflective. Try the same with BI. Compare the amount of explaining required for both cases and see which is more intuitive.
I still use BI most of the time but totally agree that it’s a good idea to set cycles as standard and encourage new users to work in cycles.
It would be great to have a basic sunlight preset, with cycles sky for beginners to get them started.
Learning to set up simple materials is quite easy even if you don’t use the node editor (I just taught an 8-year old last weekend), but getting a nice lighting setup or sky background requires some deeper understanding and easily leads to inefficient render times for beginners.
@khalibloo: Interesting, mind to share your computer specs, which CPU do you have?
I don’t think Cycles causes more confusion for a beginner. You have to learn Cycles, just like you have to learn BI or any other renderer. As a beginner you experiment with the default cube, or the monkey, you change its color or make it glossy. None of this requires deep understanding of the engine. And again, most beginner tutorials these days use Cycles. 1 button less for the user to change. 
Anyway, we will do the change for 2.73, still lot of time to add nice presets and fix bugs.
Thanks for the link, though i’ve read that before. See now that cycles adds more confusion to an already confused new user?
Light bounces, falloff, filter glossy, fireflies… a game asset doesn’t need any of those.
Light bounces… well light bounces.
But what the hell is Auto ray bias, Cubic interpolation, Minnaert shading etc?
Light falloff, there is one correct falloff: 1/distance^2 and its default in cycles.
Filter glossy, i’ve never used it.
Fireflies? Eneable no caustics and indirect clamp 8 and there will be no fireflies.
Compare the amount of explaining required for both cases and see which is more intuitive.
In my opinion engine based on real world material properties like IOR, Roughness is more intuitive.