There are a lot of projects in development as part of the google summer of code 2011, and some of those projects may help architectural visualization artists. From all those projects I have a special interest on two related with improvements for UV mapping and UV editing. I just found some preview videos showing the progress for the Automatic UV Seams by Shuvro Sarker, which is in the avocado branch. And the other video is about UV Editing Tools by Riakiotakis Antonis at the Onion Branch.
If you want to test some of those features, just look for a custom build at graphicall.org.
