Having used Bryce 5.5 & 6 I can easily say one thing about Bryce is it's incredibly short learning curve. Besides being a lot of fun Bryce taught me the basics I needed to step up to the next level , Vue 6. 
Bryce Pros: Easy to learn. Will render a scene above 3000x2250 pixels. Bryce 6 has IBL, Imaged Based Lighting or HDR if you prefer. It can group objects without crashing, LOL, but it is true Vue 6 Esprit has crashed on me everytime I try to group. The fact that Bryce 6 has been completely rewritten from ground up and future versions are probably going to give people what much more expensive packages give. After prerelease, it's still only a 100 bucks!!!
Bryce Cons: Render quality can not compare to Vue, although if you go through the Bryce Gallery here and see the arts of bs58, Monsoon's early Bryce work, pjero, Death_at_Midnight, estevez, Flak, hobbit, Hythshade, MarioG, Yoro, these are to name a few of my inspirations, you will be quite inspired no matter what proggie you choose. Bryce render times are not that bad if you know what you are doing, but they will set you back a day or two, LOL!!! 
Vue Pros: Also easy to work with and I have only worked with it for about a week and I love it. Render quality is most times Photorealistic compared to Bryce and about as good as the big dogs, you know them as Lightwave3D, 3DS Max, Maya, Modo, and only a couple of others in this class. Vue has had IBL or HDR. Spectral atmospheres, WOW, That a HUGE PLUS for me, Love them. Makes Simple Animation much easier. Bryce Animation is a headache at best. Vue has several different versions for you to pick from, which ever you want or can afford. For me it was Vue 6 Esprit and even though there a few annoying bugs with it I still love it and after the Full Release Versions are out I will probably upgrade to Infinity. It's really one #@&& of a piece of software.
Vue Cons: Honestly I don't know all these yet. The three most annoying for me are that it will not let me render larger than 3000x2250 pixels, says I am out of Memory, LOL, I have 4 GBs of PC 5400 RAM in each of my Dualcores. PC 5400 RAM has a speed of 667 MHz. It will not let me group, don't know why, but everytime it crashes : ^ (  and it will not take big Bitmap files. I had to scale down all my Bryce 4000x4000 pixels textures to 500x500 pixels so Vue could handle them
Last Word: From me anyway. I have Loved using Bryce and will continue to use it, but from now on Vue is "My Main Squeeze", Also if you want a list of the better Vue artist, go through the Vue gallery and be sure to bring a roll of paper towels with you to wipe up your drool, LOL!!!!!!!

I would rather be Politically Incorrect,
Then have Politically Correct-Incorrectness!!!