Hi Mark,
C8 has awesome rendering abilities and the lack of support for Poser cloth import is a big dissapointment.  I use Poser to set up animations and Carrara to do the renderings.  I can work cloth anims around this by using Poser animations in the background in C8 annd adding props.  One plus is that the renderings are faster but the quality suffers when some special effects are desired.