For my money, quality vs price Lightwave is my app of choice: one of the best modeller and gorgeous render engine, very good UV mapping tools, good obj export since ver 7.5 (especially with Daz's freebie morph_obj lscripts). Tons of tutorial on the web. A pretty good collection of built-in plug-ins, a lot of free ones around. Some very good user forums. A bit daunting at first, you need a forklift for the manual, but a very rich deep program. 3dMax, Lightwave, Maya, Softimage...are expensive professionnal programs, you need to invest time to master them. The program you choose should depend on your level of commitment to 3d and of course your pocketbook.

Dominique Digital Cats Media