Carrara has been pretty stable on my system. Been using it professionaly since January and would have to be dragged back kicking and screaming to use RD5.5 For the price, I think it's the most full featured package available. The several plugins that I've added to it (Lost Horizons Software Carrara Powerpack and Digital Carvers Guilds Anything Glows, Glare and Zenstars Tree Druid) have added incredible additional feature sets for very little money. While there are some software bugs, most that I've seen posted are usually associated with hardware/software issues. The newer your equipment, the more ram you have, the better Carrara will perform. It virtually never crashes on my system. Is Carrara a Lightwave or Maya. No. But, currently, I don't need that additional performance, abilities or price that comes with either one of those packages either. You can make Carrara jump through some pretty interesting hoops. If I couldn't rely on the program, I wouldn't use it professionaly.