V-Ray for Rhino material paths

[wcmansp]

In a previous release of V-Ray for Rhino (e.g. 1.05.29, our EDU lab release) importing a material would add a search path to that material's location, one that V-Ray would search for any material it couldn't find. This was extremely useful, since it allowed materials from a common library to be copied wherever a user wanted to put them and as long as a single material was mapped back to the library location, all materials would be found when, for example, using a renderfarm. The current VfR 1.5 (x64 w/Rhino 5) doesn't appear to do this -- each material, as it becomes listed in the V-Ray Progress Window, shows only its original location (e.g. C:\mytextures\<sometexture>). While it is possible now to import collections, our collection is currently around 1.5Gb. Is this the expected behavior in 1.5? If so, isn't it be more useful to be able to reference large collections via a single path than to have to path map each material? Is there another way to approach this?