I absolutely love Vue and I wouldn't change it for anything else. :-)

If you compare the full price of Vue Infinite with any other professional 3D package, like Maya or 3DS Max, you'll see that Vue costs much, much less (Vue Infinite costs about $900 but Maya costs $5000).

However, in the hobbyist area, Daz recently launched Carrara 7 and, from the features list, it sounds really promising (never tested it though). And it has a perfect integration with Poser, so they say. Carrara costs a lot less than Infinite (about $250, I think). Check it out at www.daz3d.com. I didn't find any demo (I was also interested because they claim to have some features that Vue doesn't have, like particles or embedded modelling, both things I always really wanted in Vue).