"while you finish saving up try blender, its an awkward beastie to get used to but you wont regret it (if you can get on with it)"
Totally agree with this.  And as you tried Octane anyway, you might like to know that Blender includes a render system called "Cycles" which is pretty much like having Octane built into the Blender viewport, it's GPU accelerated rendering direct in the Blender viewport.  I have Octane, and love it, but wouldn't have bothered with it if I'd known about Cycles in Blender.

Up until they updated the Blender interface, I used to try it out on each major update but always ended up dropping it because of the interface.  But I desperately wanted to be able to use Blender, and the good news is that since they updated the interface, I'm really enjoying it.  What's extra cool is that there's nothing the other packages can do that Blender can't do, or if there is, the sheer force behind Blender will see to it that the situation is rectified.

If you were to follow headdheld's advice and get your head around Blender while you save, I doub't you'll even bother with your current plan and you'll likely regret a lot of what you already paid out (I know I do).  Blender is free, and if there's difficulty learning it, there is always the option to buy a nice chunky "Printed User Guide".  If you buy a printed User Guide from the Blender Foundation, you not only get what the commercial efforts try to avoid to increase their profit margin (a real printed manual), you also support Blender, you get a physical product, you get to enjoy learning it better, and all for the cost of a user guide.

So to answer the question: "Is a Poser > Vue Workflow Wortth $600?"
IMHO, no, it isn't, for the reasons pointed out.