I'll add one more thing to my prior post. When I discussed the above chain of thought with my vendor, RFX

http://www.autodesk.com/cgi-bin/nadealdis.pl?dealid=USD354

and after listening to my studio workflow and plans, he strongly suggested I take the one-month trial of SoftImage XSI as part of my decision-making process.

As I had already been to two user meetings and poured over the site and forums for XSI, I am already interested. 

He said my soup-to-nuts XSI seat, with hair and cloth and several render engines, would be less than $2000.

Of course, soup-to-nuts for XSI does not included their cute little facial expression module FaceRobot, which is $25,000 by itself!

::::: Opera :::::

P.S. Maya Nucleus....that is in development, right? Wonder if it will be "folded into" the current $7000 for Maya? Doubt it. Here's how the thinking goes: 'This module is not expensive for a movie production effects house, because frankly it is far less than the salary of one expert animator, and our claim is that the purchase of the license will certain allow you to hire one less animator due to its power." That's the exact logic told to me concerning FaceRobot, and you can tell that logic is in play on the page for Maya Nucleus. More power to 'em, it actually makes sense, but does not help us drooling artists!