I'm not sure how I could do anything other than luminous points on a background sphere? That's all I ever have done. But I have done night shots with my stars before. Perhaps I wasn't path tracing like I wanted, was the issue. Even if it didn't, or did, it's a bug, Matt. A non-reflective surface shouldn't be reflecting points, and this is clearly going to slow down scenes, and is probably what we've been complaining about for over a year now with the PT renderer.
The procedural luminosity can't get "blurry" as it's function based.
And I don't think cheating this, just for stars is appropriate when this is clearly going to impact any scene significantly, only masked by lighting. There should be no reflection on anything unless applied, really, even in PT, regardles of "realism". If the user doesn't want it there, but PT to effect other things, that should be how it is imo. Applying a reflection shader can provide that realism if needed.