Several years ago, I was looking at my first "post-Poser" application so I tried Lightwave. Its interface is...unique. I don't know how much it's changed since then but I thought that dividing the modeller and the animation into two separate programs was counter intuitive. I didn't much care for the way the menu items sat on the screen (rather than the usual method of collapsing under a menubar). I was very impressed with the render quality.

Personally, i would not go the hosting route. I'm a bigger fan of the obj / obj import /export. It's a little more work (usually the rigging will be better) but only needs to be performed once and makes the asset almost native to the app.

I'm glad you mentioned the low res V4. I just got finished rigging her last night and very excited to start some animation tests. Geez, outside of the obvious, I can't understand why lo res characters are slow to get to market (a 40k poly reduced res M3 doesn't qualify as lo res).