I don't know about a lot of the others but C4D is quite friendly to get going in. I greatly enjoy my tinkerings in it.

You can buy either modular or packages. I run modular myself with the R10 core (Includes BodyPaint now),  the Advanced Render (now includes Pyrocluster) and Hair modules. I am not into animation myself or I would have taken one of the package bundles. As a competative advantage, VRAY for C4D is in serious development by some respectible people. 

From a very unscientific observation point of view, C4D seems to have a lot of professional use in product visualization, archi-viz and motion graphics fields. (based on a who's who look at the C4D forum at CGTalk)

Pass no temptation lightly by, for one never knows when it may pass again!