There actually is a beats/bar setting in renoise it’s just not used in the displaying of the pattern at all, just for metronome/precount. See prefs=>audio.
Renoise 3 is definitely getting different highlight options! 
There is a tool made by Dblue I believe called fractional beats or something like that, is probably the easiest way to do triplets without switching to 12Lpb.
What sort of highlight options Reason 3 should be getting?
Doesn’t appear to be anything like that in the beta
Although the lack of visual organization has actually worked to my benefit once, programmed in something that made no musical sense by accident and it sounded good to me…I’d still like to have it someday though lol
As someone who uses writes a lot of stuff in odd meters like 7/8 and compound meters like 6+2/8, this would be a really big improvement. Approximating odd meters by setting the LPB to the right value only sort of works, because pattern highlighting and metronome ticks are not where they need to be.
Also needed is support for arbitrary time signature support in the metronome precount, and for the metronome precount to use whatever time signature has been set for a specific pattern. The metronome in Renoise is also a pain to use if you have time signature changes mid-song, because it does not track along with the song and is buried in the preferences. Being able to set time signatures in patterns is also important when exporting to MIDI, otherwise there is a lot of editing to do when you open up the MIDI file in another application.
Adding a command to renoise like TSxy where x is the number of beats per bar and y is the note length might work, for example, TS44 would represent a time signature of 4/4, TS58 = 5/8, TS9F =9/16. Not sure what you would do if you wanted to use notes in the time signature smaller than sixteenth notes or how you would represent compound time signatures, so something else might be needed to handle more exotic meters but the above example would be really helpful if implemented. Pattern highlighting and metronome ticks should track this command.
Secondary highlighting of rows (and also secondary variations in the metronome) are very useful when working in odd meters. If I have a composition in 3/4, I want different secondary highlighting than if I am working in 6/8, even though both might use the same LPB division (1+1+1 vs 3+3).
Having support for time signatures is also important when using other DAWs in conjunction with Renoise.
So…it’s occurred to me that one of the reasons a secondary highlight for measure is difficult to implement is that it would break a lot of existing themes so here is a different idea, would a thin line in between rows be possible? A simple line works in music notation, so why not in a tracker? Some kind of visual indicator of bars would be really helpful, it’s a basic aspect of music and most methods of recording note data feature this organization. Are there any better workarounds as of now than simply making every pattern one measure only? Any helpful tools I’m unaware of?