"But unlike the big dogs that cost $800 and up, with Bryce you get all the tools in one shot. No additional and expensive plugins are needed to upgrade or suplement existing features. So sure some programs do all that cool stuff Bryce can't, but you have to fork out additional $$$ beyond what you're starting with in order to do so." Forking out additional $$ for plugins isn't a big deal to people who are making decent cash from their work (ie., professional users). It's a write-off as a business expense. In fact, as mentioned above, the fact that a studio can't take advantage of a flexible plugin programming platform means that the software is very limited for production use. Years ago, "high end" software used to cost studios upwards of $30,000 to license, and more if they wanted additional licenses. "Over the years, Bryce has fallen far behind in it's render technology, which really put it out of contention for most production use, but it's not totally unusable in that respect either." It's fallen behind in more than just that actually. As a landscape generator, it's still one of the best, if not THE best. But if you take into account that most pro-level CG these days requires a lot of compositing and advanced animation tools, and the fact that advanced particle systems are used very often in generating special effects in CG shots, you begin to understand Bryce's true limitation in production work. Not to mention the absence of micropoly displacement, which is what gives PRman it's advantage over most other renderers for production (and PRman costs a LOT of cash), and also the absence of one's ability to render things like ambience, shadows, and specularity in "layers" for post-compositing and better color correction really hurts Bryce's chances in production use. Why do you (when I say you I'm speaking in general terms) think studios willingly pay for multiple licenses of $3000-$5000 software? Because it allows them MUCH greater control over every aspect of creation in much less time than most lower-end software is capable of. THAT is what justifies a software's price tag. As I said before, it's all in what you do with it, and what you need it to do.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.