Thanks, that link seems interesting and relevant!
Well, ... the Qt3D is a higher level framework that isn't really relevant to the stuff I'm doing considering that I'm basically running my own "framework", i.e. my game engine that renders to my rendering surface.
In my use case what I really need is just to have Qt provide me a rendering surface with good performance (and ideally with working integration with the rest of the widget system) and then get out of the way.