Since price is secondary (be careful there ;) for you you might want to get Carrara first (demo anyway) and see if its modeler(s) are sufficient for you. In fact, Carrara may feel a bit less daunting to get your feet wet anyway since you won't be overwhelmed by a huge toolset, never having worked with a modeler before. Carrara has a very good vertex modeler now. It's common to see people new to 3d get dazzled by "Pixar uses this" or "so and so uses that". Try not to fall into that trap. Those operations have hundreds of people (extremely talented people) doing very specific tasks full time. What works for a few hundred full time pros could be a slog in the mud for a part time solo hobbyist. The Maya forums are full of hobbyists who've spent a chunk of change and then never do anything with it beyond rendering semi-transparent shiny spheres with hair ;)