If you are just learning the program, it might be good to learn the core, but Fenric's plug-ins are great time-savers once you know what you are doing. I use his pose helpers for things like mirror poses, reset poses, reset morphs, change visibility of figure elements, etc. all the time. I do know how to do it in Carrara without them, it's just much faster to do it for figures using Fenric's utilities. So, once you get comfortable and find yourself getting annoyed at having to go an manually set visibility property* on all the 16 components of each hand, it will be time to go to Fenric for help. :)

Best of luck!

 

*With figures, if you want to set a sub-element of the mesh (for example, only the hand) invisible it's not enough to uncheck the "Visible" property under the name (which is there for every element of Carrara), you must also find the poser-imported property of that subgroup (sits right above morphs) and uncheck it there too. Or apply a poser pose which sets invisibility to that part, but you don't always have the right ones ready.