Well here is my two pence. For my style of creation Lightwave is my weapon of choice. 1st, what you get out of the box is incredible. Everything you need including some 3rd party plugs are on the CD. 2nd, Very widely used app in the film industry. I could look at Newtek's website and find out what it was being used with. 3rd, Incredible community. Lightwave has a massive community. 4th, The modelling in Lightwave is top notch. Rail/Spline modelling, metaball, vertex, primative, it can all be done and I have tried them all with different results. 5th, Expressions have become a daily routine for me an animation. Primary and secondary motion can be achived with great ease using expressions. In two words and a number, I can make a hellicopter's rotor blade turn how I want it without a single keyframe. 6th. Lscript Commander. Possibly the best addition to lightwave outside of weight maps and endomorphs. The ability to turn commands into workable scripts is a massive time saver. 7th, Distributed Rendering. I can go out and buy a simple cheesy refurbished system for $300 bucks and create a render garden at no extra cost to software. 8th, Well look at the images above. Some are from my short film and others are from still shots. Only 5 years ago I could not even imagine myself making cartoons and such but now, I work on the dream everyday and it has become more tangible since I got Lightwave. All other apps are good but for my personal style, it's lightwave all the way.