Bryce has a lot of GREAT uses. I am not saying that bryce is a bad/obsolete program at all. It is PERFECT for beginning 3D as you can get results and really work on your art rather than mastery of the program. I am saying only that as for myself, I have reached the technical limits of bryce and they have not been lifted with the 5.5 update, and I for some reason don't anticipate miracles to be worked by Bryce 6. Carrara seems to extend the bryce toolset and keep most of what I love about bryce, so it seems the natural direction to travel. It's not ideal; I wish bryce had been updated years ago so that I had reason to justify staying with it. My bryce no longer fuctions under the new Tiger OS so I have to emulate an old OS with poor graphics support just to use it. PC users do not have this problem, so there is less of a reason to panic. If bryce 6 can deliver the tools and improvements an advanced user needs and wants, then I won't have any qualms about switching back. Keep in mind that Carrara is NOT nearly as easy to use as bryce, and the advanced features require a lot of learning and research. I have used countless 3D programs for several years, including Maya, 3dsmax, and lightwave, and over these years I have picked up a large vocabulary of terms and experience with things such as HDRI-based lighting, photon maps, refractive caustics, shader iterations, radiosity interpolation, XDUGEF modeling ;-), and render-spawned instancing. These features are part of what appeals to me in carrara, and to a beginning or intermediate user these terms have no value or use. In the end, the old "use what works for you" doctrine really does hold true.