*"Hey, what's the deal with DAZ? It looks like it's more of a Poser like program for setting up and dressing already made models than it is a 'from scratch' modeler...

• Are you speaking of DAZ Studio?
  At the basic level it's a freeware figure posing and animation program which can do a lot of the stuff Poser can, including exporting posed figures as .obj files, which can be useful if you need some people in your render. DAZ studio, and Poser are definitely not Modelers.
     Carrara on the other hand is a fairly full-featured 3D content creation suite. Carrara's modeling tools aren't as powerful as some of the really good modeling apps like Modo, Silo, or even Hexagon, but they are pretty good, and fairly well rounded.