Lightwave has a steep learning curve (especially for a newbie) but it does have very powerful animation features and with the project messiah plug-in can do things like Jimmy Neutron (I don't think someone would even attempt such a thing in Carrara). Animation Master is supposed to have the best character animation tools in the biz (killer bean is amazing) but I've never read a review where they didn't talk about the program constantly crashing (not that Carrara is perfect either but Lightwave by comparison seems quite stable). And then of course there's Maya which seems to have most of the buzz these days but I get the sense that much of the appeal of Maya lies in the fact that it can be Mel-scripted and basically turned into something very customized. Don't know much about SoftImage. Carrara's bones seem like a nice way to get started with characer animation but I don't think they're on par (at least yet) with the type of features you get in some of the other programs. The physics module is handy but it seems like perhaps the new version isn't quite as good as the old version. I guess it all depends on what you're hoping to accomplish. If nothing else, Carrara seems like a nice set of training wheels for learning about advanced features like boning, caustics, global illumination, polygon/vertex modeling, spline modeling, etc. If you've never done anything in 3D before, jumping right into Lightwave might be a bit overwhelming (I can attest to that since I tried to learn 3D using Inspire and didn't get very far until I fired up Carrara).