This may be a reflection of Meta's history more than anything else. They were forged via mergers of different companies with different products, and never really integrated those product lines. For example, how many rendering/raytracing engines was Meta maintaining? As far as I could tell each of Meta's 3D products (Bryce, Poser, RDS, Infini-D, etc) had its own separate rendering engine. I'd wager that the products shared very little code in total. That means entirely seperate engineering efforts to support and revise those products. This is a very costly business model to develop products with. Contrast this with Adobe: Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign share a great deal of code. The Photoshop code base is levereged even more to produce Photoshop LE with little additional cost. There are other examples: NewTek delivers Lightwave and its less expensive cousin Inspire, Maxon delivers Cinema4D GO, SE, and XL at different price points, and both comapnies do so without duplicating so much engineering effort. I wonder how profitable MetaC really was. And profit is what its all about: no company is in business to make cool stuff without regard to the bottom line. As far as I could see, Carrara was the attempt to begin unifying the MetaC product lines. I was expecting to see RDS and Infini-D be discontinued in the coming year (probably along with a "Carrara Lite" introduced with limited features at a lower price). I was also expecting Carrara to share a lot of the backend code with Bryce.