And from the other side, just be aware that Blender is known for the UI from Hell for very good reasons. Some people can parse it well. Lots can get somewhat proficient. Lots and Lots find it so counter intuitive they delete the monster (speaking). Free or not, If I can't understand it, it's worthless.

I find the Poser>Vue pipeline wonderful. However, most of what I do is animation. So with Vue I get a 5 node rendergarden to sweeten the deal (been using since Vue 4, got into Vue Infinite from the get go, and got the $295 maintenance contract, which so far has been good economics). The most important thing is to adjust your textures/shaders  and lighting for the renderer you are using. Vue still gets cranky if you just feed it the standard Poser texture maps, simply because they are so bloody large. Too large. The 4096x4096x32 bit jpeg texture maps are a holdover from when shaders didn't exist. In Vue, you lose most of the fiddly resolution those textures hold due to shadows and atmospheric conditions you set. You can easily reduce them to 512x512 and not be able to actually see the difference.

Vue has a learning curve, no two ways. But at the end of the curve, you can do scenes in full 3D you never thought about. If you use Vue 2014, you have the capability of creating an entire procedural planet. It takes some doing, but you can fall from orbit all the way to nap of the earth (things like this are why I like animating.... ;D ); you can drive the procedurals with alpha maps if you wish: your planet could have 'Eat At Joes' spelled out in the terrain or the ecosystem dispersal with the right work. The time spline functions in Vue allow you to control a great deal of things over time. If you can find any of Philippe Bouyer's Vue trailers, you can see what I mean. The camera motions are all done in the timespline window; Philippe is a cinematographer, so he knows how a specific camera behaves. And he simulated chosen camera with simple keyframed motion and timesplines to modify other things.

What you want will ultimately determine what you choose. If you don't need a modeler, don't get some package that models. If you want photonically accurate non biased rendering, don't bother with the renderers that are biased (but quicker). Look at the tools as tools; CGI is nothing but a cheat to begin with. We are creating that which does not exist from a computer. It's all smoke and mirrors. The real formula you need to consider is what you want the ability to create, the time and power resources you have to invest in it, and just how long you are willing to wait for said output. You can let an unbiased renderer run for a year, and you'll find you wasted probably 363.5 days, because you can't detect any difference between day 3 and day 365. Mathematically it may be there, but due to granularity it simply gets lost in the blur. There is no one true way, so having multiple pipelines isn't a sign of anything except being more flexible in your tool choice.