I think D|S is a very good starting point for someone wanting to get into 3D, you can quickly compose a scene, and render a high quality picture out. The fact that plugins cost more, etc. will only IMHO sort the wheat from the chaff. As people who want to get serious will have to invest money and/or time to get more proffesional or personalized results. Some of the best artwork I've seen is from people working with very limited resources, but with an amazing in-depth knowledge of the application, a curious tinkering attitude and a out of the box thinking. I do like the application a lot, I wish poser had some of the same intuitive interface. I've been using poser for ages now, and although I am familiar with it, why couldn't it have the mouse wheel zoom in and out as in D|S? Render time to me is a bit relative (pun intended) if you want to do a really nice image, you don't mind the wait. I know of artist using renderers that take weeks to do one image. Again it goes back to how serious you are about the work you do, this is coming from a hobbyist that wishes was doing this for a living, because I just don't have enough time to get into it properly.

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-'I curse the day my curiosity led me to investigate the strange stain inside
the atomic acelerator chamber'-
The Nuked Bug