The shader capabilities in Carrara are significantly more powerful than in RDS (and consequently significantly more complex and complicated to learn). I confess that I was also significantly frustrated with Carrara and there are some things in Carrrara which are missing from RDS but I've made a committment (sp?) to use it and so far, it's working out. RDS is in Carrara, you just have to take some time to find it and learn to use it. The renderer is faster and in some things it looks a lot better. Some things are not better (soft shadows for an example and I can't display the shape numbers in the spline modeler anymore) but in general, it's ok. I have a webpage which describes the transition that I've gone through between RDS and Carrara. I have some things I need to add to it and then I'm going to post the address. I have a posted bug list. Does anybody else have a posted bug list?

-Kix