"With Carrara, you get stability. With Vue, you get better output"

I have both. Carrara5 Pro is both more stable, and it's not even rational to compare modeling -- Carrara beats hands down in that area. Carrara's renderer is superior. Rendering with GI settings and raytraced soft shadows is 5 to 10 times faster with C5Pro. Go to my gallery and you can see examples of both.

I can distribute instances with Carrara completely independent of materials, and can convert groups if instances to "real" instances.

If Vue wasn't constantly breaking (want to hear the latest?) it would be a fairly good application. As it is, it is overpriced shareware.

BTW, with a really big file render, I can pause C5Pro in the very easy to use batch render. Push the restart button and all render nodes start up where I paused. Except, memory is flushed so I can render huge files without "breaking them up."