This is just not Cheetah's cup of tea. The Shift-Effect is something else you can't really simulate here, like film-back and the lens correction.
Like I said, you can get (or get rid of) any distortion in photoshop you like. But it's tedious, and regarding this pic you don't have any other thing to do then render in Modo.
Modo's shader tree is something different, and you're right, it's not that easy to grasp. Modo has shader nodes, too, but they seem to be a bit difficult, while the basic layer system is actually even less complicated than Cheetah's nodes. But much more powerful as you can stack up the materials as much as you want (well, it can get a bit more difficult with masks, texture variants and stuff). You just have to understand, it's always from bottom to top.
And too change a material: Select the polys (or alternatively nothing for the whole object) and hit M (and give a name or choose an existing material). If there, an old material doesn't get deleted.
That you can delete in the shader tree without affecting the model.
It's really a quiet simple system, but very powerful (and it doesn't seem as if the node based shader system ever really took of. The layers are enough).
If you want a material with another shader (like no reflection rays or so) you put the material above the base shader and a new shader (without the reflection rays or whatever) atop of this.
Modo has quiet a big material library. You could use pbr, too, so even if it is at this point too much to learn to create your own materials, you have a wealth of materials to choose from (pbr would be good, if you wanted to render the object in Cheetah, too ...).
All in all it seems a lot of work to match an existing photography in any 3d app; it's maybe more easy in post with after effects or so (about that I don't know plain nothing), but I think you'd have to do it a few times to really master it.
And then comes the light which often is a giveaway ... wrong color, wrong intensity, sometimes even wrong direction. Next time I'd do it fully in 3d (as I said before, once). Actually you would have had far less work for this 20 pictures than with all the camera matching problems you seem to have had.
All you would have to model would be the rooms, maybe a window or two, and (maybe) the lights. Everything else, like chairs and desks, you can get for free on different sites (as you have modo, it has a model library, too).
Even if you say, you don't know how to do it, in all the time you used for this matching stuff, you'd have learned to model this things. And well, something always worth considering is: Which way to get a result is more fun :smile: