This just in:

Lightwave 11.6 is priced at $995.- during the Holiday Season (link).

In other words a state-of-the-art Lightwave installation + Poser Pro 2012 will only cost you $995+$138 = $1,133, i.e. actually a lot cheaper than Carrara + Octane + a high-end NVidia board to run Octane ($1,755, see previous post)

At this low price Lightwave comes with PDF manuals, training materials and contents.

I'm sorry but the case for an Octane renderer/plugin for Carrara simply can't be made.