For facial animimation, the haughty "real men don't use dials" attitude has, how shall we say...caused a vacuum to emerge. This need has been filled, with no shame, by the great Joe Alter. You don't see sliders or dials on this product, but he is directly manipulating facial morph targets.
http://www.lbrush.com/max.htm

Morgano, I am not disagreing with you, but I don't follow what you are saying....

"the numerical fields..." what do you mean by that? When I select an actor in Carrara, a list of sliders appears. True, the transition/rotation/scale sliders are not there. 

But, you can move the morph slider or you can type in a value. Do you mean the number to the right of each slider, which you can open up and type into?

"Carrara would benefit from having decent dials, too."   Are you saying you prefer dials to sliders for some reason?