This is not even semi-OT it is completely ON topic. Poser was originally designed with the idea that it would be standard practice to make your renders elsewhere, and it is only really since Poser 5 that there has been a serious attempt to develop Poser as a renderer. It is still very clunky to try and use Poser as a complete scene-renderer, because too much is left over from the original "just posing" model. An example is the strange requirement in Poser that you must always have exactly one thing selected. In any other 3d program, you can have multiple objects selected, or none at all.

I have only used the Carrara 5 demo, and didn't get all that far with it without a manual; but it looks as if it could be nice. Vue 5 is powerful and easy to use, but because of memory problems, if you have a scene with large imported pz3 files, it becomes necessary every so often to save, quit and reload to recover lost system resources - otherwise Vue will crash.