It is too good a deal to pass up. Lighting makes or breaks a scene (just that alone would persuade me) so the new rendering features are a bonus. For someone else, the new figures or OpenGL might be the tipping point, but if they render in another program the lights would be unimportant. They've revealed more new features than I thought there'd be and they haven't listed all the features (6 more days?) I haven't played with Shade yet (ordered boxed software to answer your question on that), but what I've seen created in it is pretty impressive. We've seen hardly any sample renders, so it's impossible to say how good the new lighting will be. Even it it works as advertised, it may take absurdly long or cause frequent crashes. What are the specs on the new figures? What do they look like? What little we've seen so far points to more "real" rendering, any improvements to animation? I wish the best to those who've pre-ordered, but at this point I haven't seen anything that makes P6 "too good a deal to pass up." Perhaps with six more days they'll change my mind, but they don't seem to be trying very hard. I also find it a bit insulting that they're asking us to buy it without out telling us more information. The P5 release didn't exactly inspire confidence. Isn't it also odd they haven't given us a single sample render for a complex scene? If they'd take a couple of their "new characters," a few props, use image-based lighting and a few other new features, and give us a sample render with times and the specs of the machine it was done on they might be able to convince a few more folks.