Between lightwave, c4d and Carrara I've found that caustics and global illumination are easier to work with (and get good results with) in Carrara. Personally I think the best thing about Carrara is that it makes relatively advanced features accessible/affordable for the unwashed masses. Carrara is an interesting app in that in some ways it's ahead of the competition and in other ways it's still lagging behind. Another way to think about the apps is whether you're likely to be successful trying to use them on your own or as part of a small studio vs. working at ILM or Digital Domain where you'd have lots of help if you get stuck and probably a lot of workflow issues would already have been worked out for you (and maybe you'd even be working in a totally customized mel-driven interface instead of having to learn Maya at all). Another thing that's happening is workflows that combine multiple 3D apps (such as Maya-Lightwave or vice-versa). Personally I like to model in c4d (because it has tools that the carrara vm is missing) and then finish up in Carrara. So maybe it's becoming more mix&match than trying to get one tool that does everything. I think there are some other 3d apps like blender and merlin and wings3d but I don't have experience with them.