YES! I agree with you on all your points about the comparisons! I have never used Maya or C4D, but I have used the trial version of 3dsmax 8, and while it IS extremely powerful, with a lot of useful things for animation, etc., I found it a bit overwhelming, and of course the price was out of my budget! The one thing I did love about playing with 3dsmax was it's Particleflow feature. It's particles that are controlled by nodes, much like Poser 5 and 6 material room, which is very powerful as well. Also, I was really getting into rigging meshes with CharacterStudio. It seemed VERY easy, compared to Carrara's bones, or even the regular bones rigs in 3dsmax, which I never got the hang of. However, I don't have years to spend learning a package either, and I was able to jump right in with Carrara 4 without too much fuss or confusion. Can't say that about 3dsmax. Also, Max seemed to require a lot more system resources to run than Carrara uses, so I'm able to run Carrara on my laptop, and still multi-task if need be. Don't get me wrong, I would have purchased 3dsMax 8 if I had the extra cash, but if you're on a budget like me, and still want as much rendering power as the big guns give you, Carrara is by far the best choice! I'm thrilled with it so far!