I think the truth of it is you pick a 3d program as a personal thing, you really need to play with them for a decent amount of time to see which work flows suit you best. I love 3ds max, hate maya, C4d has great modelling but rubbish textures, but all in my personal opinion, other folk love these packages and produce far better works then I do in any of them :).

I've never tried lightwave, but I've used blender,  truespace, Bryce, 3ds Max, XSI and Cinema 4d over the years. Currently I use Blender, as others have said the interface took a little getting used to, but I remember the same thing when I started using Max.

I used bryce and truespace when I first started getting into 3d. I then got to learn 3ds max when I started work in a fast proto-typing team. Given that I am no longer doing 3d in that professional role, I can't justify the cost of upgrading Max from 3.1 (basically it's so old I would have to buy new).

I spent quite a while comparing different package to decide what to move to (allowing me to use newer Lighting techniques - GI, Metropolis Transforms and so on).  XSI, Cinema, Maya where all trialled on my machine and Blender. I spent at least 3 weeks with each package, the ones I liked the most were XSI and Blender. The deciding facter that swayed me to blender were 2 things, a) cost and b) hair/fur is better in blender then in XSI foundation. moving up to a more expensive version of XSI or buying  a plug in would have resolved the latter (leap frogging over blender), but the cost bit for me was persuasive.

As a side note I tend to use Indigo as my main renderer lately  - been doing some architectural work and it's fantastic.

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Toolset: Blender, GIMP, Indigo Render, LuxRender, TopMod, Knotplot, Ivy Gen, Plant Studio.