I won a copy of Lightwave 2018 via the Holiday animation contest at Rendo, plus I think they offered me an upgrade price to the new version. I used Lightwave years ago (V.6?), and even found my old USB key. It doesn't work in Win10 but you no longer have to use a hardware key. Still, I'm probaly only going to use it for LW specific content and features, and not often at that. Carrara just has too many features that I don't see elsewhere - NLA (my clip library has grown substantially), seamless Poser content handling, a great NPR renderer, excellent lights, a full featured Sequencer, etc., etc. I suspect LW has better modeling features, but not being a modeler, not an attraction for me. My preference for Carrara is undoubtedly based to a large degree on familiarity. For most tasks, I've done it many times and don't have to think about how to do it in Carrara. Leaving more time for how to make a scene better. I'm trying to move into a new video editor because of some other plugins I won, and also because the new version of Particle Illusion requires a high end video editing program. (Vegas - now from Magix - vs. Magix Movie Edit Pro) Not too big a leap, but still sometimes have to wonder how Vegas does things. But still, Lightwave does not have some key features that I mentioned, e.g. NLA clips and seamless animating with Poser content (of which I have LOT). Last I checked, animating with Poser content in Lightwave requires Poserfusion, meaning you have to animate in Poser. Not a terrible thing, but Carrara's animation features are much superior to Poser's, although I do use the latter for Poser specific features like ERC models.