I've been using POV-Ray since it was in beta, and I think it's great. It's scripting capabilities make it very useful. I set this scene up in Poser for a Renderosity Halloween contest a few years ago, used PoseRay to export it, then tweaked it and re-did some of the textures and lighting in POV-Ray. (The lighting still isn't very good, but that's 'cause I suck at lighting, not because of any limitation in POV).

POV does take some time to learn, but it will give you very nice renders.