I've had that problem taking models from Wings into Carrara. Carrara does smoothing much differently from Wings or what I was used to with Poser. I'm finding that a good work flow is to do a little beveling where I want slightly round edges, then taking the models into Carrara, then setting hard edges where needed in there and smoothing.

I've really got to learn C4D. Aside from the otherwise wasted investment, I did a displacement test with it and Carrarra the other day, using the same displacement map on the same polygon grid. Carrara took four and a half minutes to render the displacement (I had cranked up the polygon smoothing in the displacement just high enough to avoid artificacts, but still pretty high). C4D, on the other hand, rendered the same scene at the same resolution in about fifteen seconds. And, it looked better.

I really like Carrara, and I'm not sure I'd get rid of it, but C4D certainly seems to have some advantages.

So far, I've cheated on my "rigging" for the current animation. I'm using all morphs and "modifiers" (function in Carrara that bend, twist, or otherwise distort the object they're attached to). The only rigged models I've got are four that I imported from my Poser content.

I'm a big believer in "do whatever works".