It's a long story but the bottom line is that I just plain enjoy working in Carrara. I think the spline modeler alone may be worth the price of admission. Also, the availability of affordable plug-ins like those from DCG and Lost Horizon and VectorStyle helps as well. Plus the Carrara user community is overall very supportive. And maybe there's a bit of David vs. Goliath in there as well (go Eovia!). I gave up on Carrara at first because I thought it was under-featured relative to the big boys but over time I've learned assorted tips and tricks for making Carrara behave (plus the v2 release offered caustics and global illumination and smoothing and the third-party plug-ins help fill in some of the gaps). I started with Inspire and then upgraded to Lightwave. Lightwave is an awesome beast but I've yet to tame it. I think it's the kind of program you have to use every day in order to feel comfortable (partly because it doesn't tend to follow standard interface conventions; for example to constrain a circle you use Ctrl instead of Shift). Plus the renders seems to take quite a while, especially if you have anti-aliasing turned on (even at a low setting). If you want nice-looking glass you have to create all these extra surfaces for Air-Glass-Air refraction transitions. There's an amazing fur shader called Sasquatch but it will set you back $500. If you ask a question on a Lightwave forum you're often told to RTFM (or worse). And finally I just like the output I get from Carrara better; I find that I really have to work at it in Lightwave to get the same quality of output. C4D is a very interesting program and I really like their modeler and materials system. It's easy to get great-looking metals and really glossy colors plus the renderer is fast. C4D is big in Europe so a lot of the online material is in German, though. The default interface layout doesn't give you quite as much room for your models. Some of the deepshade shaders are amazing (http://www.maxon-computer.com/deepshade/) plus C4D has the SLA system of procedural shaders. And the particle system can spit out objects (even lights!), not just little particles. Sometimes I'll model in C4D and then finish up in Carrara. The bottom line is that Carrara is fun and relatively easy-to-use, has a friendly user community, relatively affordable plug-ins and usually produces great-looking output (some of the "you have to render at four times the target size and then downsample in photoshop" problems notwithstanding). Given that I'm willing to live with some of its quirks and shortcomings. I've been very impressed by the Carrara efforts of TOXE and LITST and Mark Bremmer (and others too numerous to mention). If I were trying to do something along the lines of Jimmy Neutron (my wife and I are hooked on that show!) I'd probably have made a different choice (Lightwave has a lot of features geared toward efficient workflow and working with very large, complex scenes plus it's very stable). If Carrara didn't exist I'd probably be using C4d most of the time. I will say that both Lightwave and C4D seem more stable/robust than Carrra. Maybe that's part of what you pay for although the price gap between Carrara and these other programs is diminishing over time and Eovia's tech support folks seem quite active these days as well. Back to working with Lost Horizon's new fresnel shader ...