Well I own both Vue5I AND Carrara, and I'll say that after 7 months of HARD use, I appreciate Carrara's landscape ability -- AND STABILIY. The quality of rendering in Vue, when using fine-scaled textures is grainy. To get out the grainy renders, you need to bump up the render object & texture antialiasing settings to levels that make a snail rendering my work look fast!

I'm presently doing a render in C5Pro that Vue chokes & dies on! And the tree leaves & needles (on pines) in Carrara are poly based, not mapped 2D planes like Vue's. Up close, the Carrara trees look better -- I got proof! Also, Carrara's tree editor can create original species, vs Vue's limitations to only modify existing ones. Since C5Pro's plant editor now allows immediate visual feedback when modifying plants, it is now much better than the Vue implementation.

Want me to go on...?