Well, bryce 5 is mediocre. But.. there are a million ways to trick it into being great. It's like buying a puppy versus buying a well trained circus dog. Sure the circus dog costs more and knows more tricks than the puppy. But you can teach the puppy to do whatever you want. I for one like the challenge of bryce, I find it fascinating that you can replicate very expensive software rendering with such an inexpensive program. Bryce will allways be my first true love in 3d art. Man, why couldn't they give it a sexy feminine name,lol...