To get back to the thread,

there isn't anything wrong with Carrara.  Pretty much all of the constructive feedback written in this thread is practical.  Let's summarize.

1.  DAZ has focused much of the development of Carrara on DAZ studio / Poser interfacing and capabilities.

2.  Carrara has had some significant upgrades for some things such as bullet physics and there have been rendering engines which can now interface with Carrara.

3.  In general, Carrara hasn't had the kinds of upgrades or updates that would keep it competitive with some of the bigger heavier hitting packages.  This aspect has been a significant problem for the code.  Carrara hasn't kept up with the market.  In addition, DAZ has had some issues with the user base.  As an example , there was a significant expectation that there would be version 9 by now and there are some changes which have been done to the code which a large portion of the user base are not happy with.

So, is there a problem with Carrara?  I think we are all wondering what the answer to that question.  There are a lot of us out here who have been using the code productively for a long time and we would like to continue doing that.  However, if things keep going the way they are, we will move on to other tools that can do the things we need to do.

Hope that helps.

Sounds reasonable. What other tools are you referring to, exactly? All I have seen in a similar price range is Blacksmith, and going up the price scale a bit, Maya LT and Lightwave.

Well, of course there's always Blender. It's getting better with each update. I've played with it some, but I'm still more comfortable with Carrara. 3DCoat is reasonably priced and good at sculpting, 3D painting, uv mapping and retopology. It's also coming along as a renderer. Silo is a good, stable modeler. I use Silo as my modeler (because I just can't get my mind around Carrara's modeler), 3DCoat for 3D painting and mapping (Carrara has pretty decent 3D paint capabilities, but I like 3DCoat better), and I set up and render in Carrara. I use the many plugins for Carrara to tweak or create shaders for my models. I render in Carrara using the native renderer or I use Lux with the Luxus plugin. I've also used Blender's fluid sim capability and imported the result into Carrara for textures and rendering. It came our pretty well.

I also rig my models in Poser because that's where my experience is. Once I get more comfortable with my skills, I may move away from Poser, we'll see.

You can use Carrara in conjunction with a whole range of software to get what you're after. Carrara is flexible, stable and easy to learn. With Carrara, you're not tied to any one piece of software.