Thanks a lot, this was a really great course. I enjoyed both the modeling and the materials part quite a lot and learned a lot of nice tricks from you. Thank you!
In the end, I quickly decided to run Cycles with the default settings for comparison – without making any cycles specific adjustments. It took 1 min 24sec with my RTX 3090. The fog and the glow of the lights didn’t make it through and a few other fixable problems popped up. I guess that’s totally expected when simply switching the Render engine.
But the water spots on the floor looked much better out of the box!
Evee:

Cycles

Thanks!