Short answer is no, there is nothing wrong with Carrara.  It's actually pretty great. 

 

Now DAZ on the other hand... let's just say it's a good thing I don't have to be in love with the owners of the software to appreciate how great the software is on it's own... 

 

You mention that you have no intention of using DAZ content, so like Stanley said you should have very few issues, the main complaints with Carrara have been with little problems in using Genesis and Genesis2.  Still, for the main part Carrara can use Poser and DAZ content natively, which imo is a good feature to fall back on if you don't want to model everything yourself (but if the project requires that, Carrara can do that too) since there's a wealth of inexpensive fairly good quality content available to use.

 

But no, there's nothing inherently wrong with Carrara.  I've tried tons of different applications, and Carrara remains my favorite and by far the most useful.  And with the new concept that Stringtheory figured out of using soft-body proxy objects, it now can do dynamic cloth (with very quick sims too) at least in version 8+, as part of the Bullet physics engine (it just took someone with a bit of genius, like Stringtheory, to figure out how to make it work).

 

The development cycle for Carrara is slow verging on non-existent.  But then again, it already does nearly everything, so even if there is never a Carrara 9 (which I believe there will be, if only to make Genesis/Genesis2 content work more seamlessly) it may not much matter.   In terms of finding an inexpensive alternative to Maya, I think Carrara is an excellent choice.  Actually it's a pretty narrow field of software that could possibly fill those shoes, at least inexpensively.  Carrara, possibly Blender... drawing a blank otherwise..