Carrara5 also does caustics, and quite well, had some success with gems in it, and  i prefer it over vue. With the ability to program my own plugins, the software (should) never truely be obsolete for many years, until someone makes a toy that I can't program myself :)

About 2 years ago i worked with poser6 for quite awhile trying to make 3d gem materials tha look realistic. I found that poser6 can fake some effects from caustics, but not fully, and the color of the gem (ruby, emerald, etc) effected the results a bit, diamonds since clear, i couldn't for the life of me make one to my satisfaction. 

Ruby filters red light, emerald filters green (using most known colors, but for those who don't know, there are tons more colors, seen blue diamond in titanic? hehe rare but exists =P) but diamond, the most common clear one, filters no light, and each wavelength (color of light) going into it, goes in a slightly different direction, just like a prism.Shine a light through a prism, and you get a rainbow on the wall :) Effect of this is giving diamonds a "living fire" inside, if cut right. 

Closest i came to diamonds was to render 1 map of my scene with the usual raytracing needed (ignoring diamond quality), then set all lights to have only their red light, area render with raytrace to MAX, just the diamond area, cut and paste to a paint program, do again for green light, but slightly different refraction on the gem material, and a 3rd with blue light and different refraction. Put the 3 color cuts together should look normal, paste it in the first rendered picture that's you're scene. Tada! Without caustics though, it isn't perfect, you won't get reflected light effects you see from a spoon on a table, but its a little step forward.

Now a Ruby isn't always a perfect red, emeralds not always a perfect green, so the above method can help with that as well, just remember the light values you had set :)