I'm going to throw my hat in the Blender camp.

Like you, I've decided to make my own stuff as I can't find the sorts of settings I'd like and I have a lot of ideas for props.  I'd also fiddled with Blender over the years but found the interface to be frankly...ridiculous.  As a professional photographer and graphic artist I knew it shouldn't be this way and tried a few other 3D programs but found that they where either outrageously expensive or they were'nt being used/developed enough.

Then a group of disgruntled Blender users got together and threatened the developers with bodily harm if they didn't fix that gawd-awful interface.  The result was the famous (and much welcome) 2.5 release.  It is now possible for a normal human being to use it with a minimum of fuss.  The result is that the user base has exploded and there are now a billion trillion (no really!...I counted 'em!) tutorials on YouTube, tons of sites and forums and even several honest-to-goodness books available.  Folks are making plug-ins and extensions for most everything.  

I've found the new Blender to be brilliant and quickly made an articulated gizmo that I'm now fiddling with in Poser to add rigging and materials.  The work flow from Blender to Poser is straight forward if you spend some time in Dr.Geep's site and learn the not-so-secret secrets of scale and importing and exporting.

I enthusiastically encourage you to give 'er a try.