Well I too have tried a bunch of 3D apps and had varied reactions to them.

I started by looking at the big well known pro apps. I tried 3DS MAX and Maya demos. I learn to use 3DS MAX, at least the basic stuff, and I managed to make some basic items. But I quickly found out that when it came to anything organic, like people, animals, creatures, that didn't involve cubes and spheres, I sucked at it, and MAX didn't make it easy for me to make stuff look good.

So I took a brief look at ZBrush, and had the same reaction you guys had: the interface is horrible. So since I really wanted to get into character and organic scenes, and building the scenes was what really passionated me, not learning character modeling, I bought Poser. It seemed daunting at first, but the features it has are impressive.

I took a quick detour with Quidam early after it came out. That's another Poser like app that focuses more on brush modeling than posing. Unfortunately it never got very high off the ground and its community is still very tiny to this day, so I went back to Poser.

I've always been against using plain image backgrounds for my scenes, because you end up with huge composition problems, with different lightings, no or fake shadows, different color tones, etc. So to build my environments I got Bryce 5.5 for free. It did some nice stuff for a free program, but it has the worse interface I have ever seen. I hated its interface every minute that I had to use it.

Then a few months ago I checked out Vue and decided to get it for my environments. I simply love it. It gives so much more realistic results than Bryce did, and its interface is a million times better. It's integration to Poser is also awesome, and the only issue I have with it is the fact that it's rather prone to crashes on my system.

So that was my trip through the 3D apps world. What will the future hold, I don't know. I'm still fairly new to Vue and have a lot to learn still. I'd like to go back to a modeling app at some point, but the only one I know is 3DS MAX and its obvious problem is the ridiculous price. I may not have to decide soon, as Vue's boolean modeling should be enough for now, but I may eventually give in and check out Carrara, Hexagon, C4D or Mudbox for creating props.