All the talk about differents apps got me to playing with ULead's Cool 3D Studio demo last night and maybe they're on the right track with all the different presets for all sorts of things (like the Carrara browser tray but on steroids). You can quickly drag&drop to get the ball rolling and then can tweak from there. The tool packs a surprising number of features into a compact interface and has some things that Carrara doesn't (like collision detection in the particle system and pre-made particle emitters for things like smoke, snow and fire that look like they may have been taken from the impressive wondertouch particleIllusion which also supplies the particle effects for Discreet Combustion). Especially if you're doing work hourly for a client it seems like these days there isn't much time in the budget to realize a particular effect or to use a 3D program and a 2D particle program and a compositor or video app all on one job. Overall I don't think Cool 3D produces output on par with what Carrara can do but the swiss army knife approach with tons of presets certainly makes for an efficient workflow.