Butch, if the price of P6 is going to keep you from paying your rent or having enough to eat, then please don't even consider it! :-) I will say, however, that there are some real upgrades to the app compared to P5. In a nutshell, the lighting has probably seen the most dramatic additions; with a new diffuse IBL source light, and a much-awaited point (or omni) light. Raytraced shadows can now have softened edges, and you can dial lights to negative values (which actually allows you to cast "shadow" instead of light from the source). You can also define light properties for affecting only the specular or only the diffuse properties of materials independantly, and render a shadows-only pass for compositing in post. Some new material options were added, like: fastscatter (which allows for a sort-of backlit SSS effect), and a gather material (which allows you to turn an object into a radiosity-like light source). The raytrace materials have some new parameters, and there's also the ambient occlusion node, which I'm sure you have heard about by now. There's also been some rendering and interface enhancements (at least i consider them enhancements). As MachineClaw suggests, there's a demo for it now, so why not download and try it out?

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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.