I totally concur. Carrara is awesome. I don't know it all, but what I can achieve with it so far is very satisfying. I am coming to terms with Hex. I model mostly with Wings, but Carrara doesn't care. Carrara 8Pro, and several versions before have never even blinked when I would import a model with lots of object groups, even some with a lot of Ngons when I made early modeling mistakes. This and the new lighting, among other tools would seem to make it a very viable choice for arch-viz and product simulation. I just have a lot of fun with it mostly.