If you want to animate on a budget with lots of functionality then Blender is free! and very feature rich, some don't like the UI, but once you've learnt a little about it - it works and works well.

www.blender.org/

On to the main thing, everyone here is going to argue about their favourite and it does x better then y. The basics of it are that there are pros and cons to most apps and much of the choice will come down to personal preference, budget and maybe career planning (i.e. choose an app that is biased towards where you want to go).

I've moved from 3ds Max to blender and I miss bits of Max but as I don't need it for work anymore I can afford the cost of it compared to blender. I was tempted by c4d which is great but I personally found the material editing frustrating, I was really tempted by houdini apprentice and reckon that is worth a look at for it's price.

I have Carrara 5 and hardly use it I find the 'rooms' concept gets frustrating but it is capable.

If the desire for landscapes is important then blender has a nice terrain plugin called A.N.T.....

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