The good: Raytrace engine is still decent, even if dated a bit. GUI environment is pretty great and mostly newb-friendly. (Kai has a reputation for that kind of stuff.) Imports a good variety of formats. Has nice library of starter objects and materials. Some neat things can be done with booleans, terrains, or metaballs.

The bad: Animation tools are very limited. Doesn't do mesh modeling (but you can overcome this with another app such as Hexagon, Silo, or Wings3D and use of importing.) No built in morphs or deformers, although latest version has some plug-in interactivity with Daz Studio.

The ugly: If you do anything fancy, large scale, or involving animation - be prepared to wait a long long time for renders to complete. That's really the only thing that hurts it on a "professional" basis. (Some pros still use it for stills and special things, but they usually stay quiet to avoid scrutiny.) It can be killer on deadlines.

Other suggested alternatives near the price range:
Blender: if you can figure out the interface, consider yourself lucky. It's capable of great renders once past that hurdle.
Carrara: Good parrallel to Bryce, has much better animation feature set, render engine can be adjusted more and made faster.
Kerkythea: Seems to be a good free render engine (results look pretty 'nuf), although I'm not too familiar myself.
Anim8or: Works for some folks, mostly for animation, render engine is weaker than Bryce.

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Barbequed Pixels?

Your friendly neighborhood Wings3D nut.
Also feel free to browse my freebies at ShareCG.
There might be something worth downloading.