Lightwave has been a TV/movies production package. If it's $300/yr for maintenance plan, that's likely not a problem for their target market. I have no intention to get started with that. I am interested in what Reallusion is doing.

Carrara? I spent ~$14 for Carrara 8.5 pro some time ago and it came with a pile of DAZ content. It seems very happy to eat 3DS meshes and spit them out as objs for Daz. It has many other laudable capabilities. You get no complaint from me on any of that. It's probably never getting upgraded. That part is not so great. At least it's a 64-bit program. It might not be a workhorse in a production environment, but it's fine for what it is.