Hi NightCabbage,

Well I mainly use modo because of my lightwave background, it was easy to lean, well in fact if you're coming from lightwave there is nothing to learn :P
C4D seems quite good, but their module system is expensive, you need a least the 'advance rendering' one to do serious rendering job ... for my personnal
work it was too expensive. (But it seems to be a really robust package, make me think to a Mercedes car :P)

I do agree with ash about the modo key features, just as I'm a negative guy I will add few points

- Crashing software, so save often, and incrementally (allready had crash during saving, so the scene was corrupted)
- The rendering engine has some serious problem for the moment, Nan's (some kind of division by 0 resulting big pink pixels), noisy area lights, spec + soft reflection giving many troubles ... they are not many options to control, by that doesn't mean it's easy to master them and produce hyper realistic image.
- Hairs are ok for fur job, don't expect anything more.
- Probably related to my hardware, but the painting/sculpting module is not that great, just enough to paint some masks. Looks like it's better to rely on zbrush and the upcoming goz bridge system for any serious sculpting job anyway.