Bones are very nice for certain deformations. I was messing around one day with the old Poser pigtails; took them into Carrara, posed them with bones, exported the results as Poser morphs. The "trial and error" method is what I use on the bend deformer, too. At least it's real-time now. Under Ray Dream it was really un-fun opening the window, setting the deformer, going back to look at the results, re-opening the window... Within the Carrara workspace it is great that none of these deformations are permanent; you can stack them, adjust them, et al. But, annoyingly, if you export to annother application you just get the base object. You have to "convert deformed object to mesh" first.