The basic point Estherau in my opinion is: If you are mainly interested in landscapes and in poser people in a landscape, then spending hundreds of dollars in Carrara is a total waste. Get a small but dedicated modeler instead (like Hexagon or Silo or the more inexpensive Wings3D etc.), and save a lot of money. If you instead plan to make also design and industrial/commercial renderings, Carrara can be good - although in my opinion, for the money it costs, I would add some more and buy the much more powerful and industry-standard Cinema4D or 3DSMax. I don't like to say this, because I have been a Carrara user and I really like the interface, but it seems to me that it's currently a misplaced product: - too expensive to be a low-end application - too poor in environmental features to be an alternative to landscaping programs (such as Vue, Mojo etc.) - and not powerful enough (and by no means no "standard" enough in the business world) to be a competition for the "big guys" (Cinema, Max and the likes). I see Carrara is currently struggling to find it's place somewhere in the middle of all this but it's a place that I don't think has really a future. In my opinion, either Carrara loses this ridiculous Standard/Pro distinction (cause it's "pro" it's not even by far something that real "pros" would use), and makes one single product (the current Pro), and sell it considerably cheaper, I mean in the $250 range - and this would make it a real and worthy alternative in the low end market, OR, it is going to progressively shrink and disappear, because of its unclear and somehow ambiguous position in the market.