Raster translucency is definitely weird, I’ll say that. I’ve followed enough of the development to know that the systems were sometimes implemented ad-hoc without consideration for larger performance/use-case scenarios, but we’re stuck with what we’ve got. Raster translucency can get surprisingly close to RT translucency actually, with some obvious limitations.
If you really need it to look picture perfect, the movie render cue actually has some good options: you can output different effects and different passes, and sometime (a while ago), I figured out how to integrate volumetric fog as an extra pass to be integrated with the path-tracer later.