I'm not a Brycer (hope you don't mind) but I like what people do with Bryce. Object instancing or Eco Systems is really old stuff, you can have it totally free with POV-Ray. With this in mind 600$ for me is really too much for this feature. I have Vue 5 Esprit (the smaller brother) because it is easier to use than POV-Ray. But unfortunately this version has a big memory management issue that E-on apparently can't resolve: even with 2 GB RAM Vue 5 Esprit crashes when you import more than just a few 3rd party objets, e.g. from Poser. And I do like the plants from RDNA and want to use them! I have not yet found a solution that really suits me, therefore I just wait. But C4D seems most promising at the moment.