In regards to the Drag + Drop. I'm not sure if I fully understand the issue. Can you provide steps as to what exactly you are doing. I can drag and drop nodes from the hypershade to AE without any issues.

In regards to the mental ray texture issue I can reproduce it and have logged this with our development team. While I could not map a texture through the Attribute editor I could push the connection through with connectAttr command. ie. connectAttr -f file1.message mib_lookup_spherical1.tex;

Can you guys post the whole command you are trying to use? -r is basically a flag that calls a rendering engine. It should work as long as it is followed with the correct value such as sw, mr, mi etc.

Just wanted to add to the comment above. Something you may notice is that piping your output to a file actually stops it from printing it on that current terminal. While there are many ways of getting around this one method I use on Linux or Mac OS X is use use a tail command in a new terminal. tail -f /directory/logfilename.log tail command prints out the last 10 lines on any given file and adding the -f command essentially follows the file and updates the output without needing to execute the tail command again.