*"If I show you the ropes in Blender, will ya send me the $500? :P"

*Blender kind of came to scare me, rather quickly.  It's not the interface, it's the undependability of it.  Every time they upgrade, half of the scripts seem to end up broken, and they upgrade every six months or whatever.  The OBJ I/O scripts were seemingly constantly broken, while I was part of the Blender Python scripting community, and no one seemed to be fixing them effectively.  And don't get me started on the problems they're having with motion/animation import and export.  Hoo boy.  I'm afraid I need more stability and organization.    

Okay.  Silo looks nice, and very affordable.  TrueSpace has a heckuva a lot of features for $595, but I've tried demos of earlier versions and found interface totally baffling.  Cinema 4D and Modo are both $895, and both look promising.  I'm going to have to do some digging, I think.  Unfortunately, my connection is too slow to download demos and I have an odd situation here, in which I need to spend the money within a certain limited timeframe.  

Thanks for the ideas, everyone.  If there are more, please keep them coming! 

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Cage can be an opinionated jerk who posts without thinking.  He apologizes for this.  He's honestly not trying to be a turkeyhead.

Cage had some freebies, compatible with Poser 11 and below.  His Python scripts were saved at archive.org, along with the rest of the Morphography site, where they were hosted.