I don't think it's wise to spend your time learning a software which is essentially dead at the moment. Yes, amapi could be purchased cheap, but time spent there will be wasted when you need something more. My personal experience with amapi was not good. It crashed constantly (obviously a lack of sufficient conditions in the tool scripts, similar to Hexagon). Even though i was sufficient in Hexagon, i found the Amapi workflow to be much worse. So then i also tried Solid Thinking (the more powerful competitor of Amapi. Much better parametric history than Amapi, but also was a workflow killer and easy to crash. Also tried Concepts Unlimited, but again i hated the workflow. And it seemed rather weak for surface editing... I use Rhino for all of my modeling, and i find it can do most everything i need (i don't create characters obviously). The scriptability is very deep. The only drawback to Rhino is a lack of parametric history on solids (it is similar to MoI in this respect). But for surface modeling and editing, Rhino is a monster... I guess it depends on your personal taste. BTW, what type of objects do you typically need to model?

jonah