ha thats funny, i was shown this at work the other day. i had a 2k hdr for reflection and a 512k map for indirect bounce, pretty cool. i was lucky the object wasnt moving so i could bake the FG.
...

sure there is a difference between those pictures. But it just looks like one has an occlusion on it and the other doesn't.
Not an mib_amb_occlusion plugged into the reflection colour. Which i...

i don't think that will do anything.

does that actually do anything? or do you mean you have a baked occlusion map that you used for a reflection map?

Glass refractive index — 1.52

wow, that photo looks so heavily photoshopped.