Basically, if you ouwn RDS and want to go to something else, competitive upgrades to Strata are about $200, Cinema 4Dxl is $495. Carra is $200 or $99, depending on which version you own, but the odds of the poser plugin showing seems highly unlikely. And that is what I wanted from Carrara. Cinema is considered a midrange app, like Max. Strata seems to be considered more of a low end product, like RDS. These are highly vague categories, not hard and fast "this app is as good as that app."