i use maya, though i've tried a lot of others. my very first one was povray, which is about as far from maya as one can be, but i'm a programmer, and it was fun to do algorithmic modelling. i got interested in the whole area at all because of curiosity about l-systems. a while later i moved on to play with terrain modelling (bryce). and then to power animator, and maya, because my partner and i started to work for alias 10+ years ago, programming, and if one has a top of the line app on the screen all day, modelling in it is sort of a natural outgrowth if one's interested in modelling at all. otherwise i would have probably used a much cheaper app; alias software was hideously expensive back then. i keep looking at other software, and experimenting with demo versions, just because i like to know what's out there and what cool stuff other people come up with. among the newest crop i loved hexagon 1.2 when i came across it, it seemed incredibly intuitive to me, and i am eager to play with hexagon 2. so it was mostly chance that i ended up with maya, and any other program has a hard time coming up against what i am familiar with and which also happens to be kick-ass.