If I could assemble a team to do this:
We could write a series of blender shaders as fragment shaders Cg or GLSlang (or both)
Then I guess we could write a vertex shader for smoothing
Then, with the aid of OpenGL and the GL_ARB_fragment_program and GL_ARB_vertex_program extensions to write a very fast opengl renderer.
Since we are not going for realtime we can take many liberties when it comes to speed in writing the shaders. Also these shaders are executed by the GPU (Note: Hardware Assisted), and from my experiences the GPU is quite fast.

I know both Cg and C++, I'll probably end up doing most of the blender coding and the rest of the team will be busy with the shaders.

and yes this is possible, I've had much success with Cg on my FX5200 ultra.
Please reply with your responses on this matter.. I'd LOVE to hear them!