About modellers, i would also suggest trying one of the free or inexpensive ones like wings, blender etc. When you are ready to move on to more expensive ones i would suggest trying silo, probably the best modeller for the price. I personally use XSI which at $495 hits the sweet spot for me in terms of price and capability. But then i also do lots of print work so its rendering quality / speed comes in very handy for me. Probably overkill if all you want is a pure modeller for poser stuff tho.

Also AFAIK Pixar dont use any off the shelf software for majority of their work. They use their own software for animation, called 'marionette'. Its supposed to be miles ahead of everything else out there and many animators would sell their left err personal junk for a chance at it :p Of course this doesn't stop all the 3d companies from hyping them up as clients, even if their software was only used to animate a toenail or something...

As for CGSociety / CGTalk, well thats a pretty pro place (with an attitude to match) so yeh you get lots of people from Pixar, ILM, Weta and so on posting there. They even run some of the contests there, like the lighting TD from Pixar runs the lighting challenge. I'd love to participate too, if only i wasn't scared to death of the talent that haunts that site ha !