I'm very happy with Carraras rendering. I'm not a fan of their modeling. A lot of us don't like the interface. Carrara is a fun app, though. Some people love the improved vertex modeling in Carrara 3.0. Maybe I should give it more of a chance. Maya is a great app, of course, but the workflow is pretty slow for most of us hobbyists. People who do it for a living might feel differently. I don't think you'll have the interoperability between Maya and Poser that you will between Carrara and Poser via Transposer. Might be some Maya/Poser plug-ins, though. I don't know.