I agree with those who say to buy C4D for those money, but the small brother, Vue5, has a render engine not bad at all and costs slightly more than bryce. The material editor is also really interesting.

I started long time ago (eons if calculated in computer age) with an amiga 500 and Real 3d, a render engine with a modeler based on primitives and boolean operations. Bryce was the natural upgrade when I bought a WC-DOS computer, since it works with booleans and has a really intuitive interface.
Now I prefer to use an external editor, like that horrible freeware called W****, and use bryce for texturing and rendering. Now, thanks to a modern number crunching processor (p4@2.4ghz), I use to put a lot of lights and complex textures in the scene (hemidomes and so on) to fake radiosity and global illumination. It takes a lot of time to set up and fine tune a scene. With Vue5 you achieve this in few clicks.

Then, if you're looking for a good and cheap render engine Vue5 is sure your best choice.
Also Blender makes it for free, but I find it difficult to manage.
For more complex things and special effects (see orgasmatic enviroment editors) there are more expensive high end programs.
And our Bryce? I think it's more a faith question and, of course, the possibility to share your work with a wonderful communuty like this at renderosity. That's why I still love my Bryce.