Pretty much every model I work on these days, Carrara first flashes up a warning sign ("can't add edge to middle of polymesh!") or just plain crashes. Today I started something that back in Carrara 3 would have taken twenty minutes. In Carrara 5, if it actually worked, it should take five minutes. After AN HOUR AND A QUARTER I gave up and deleted the file. Drum pedal (kick). Just the pedal stamping itself. A flat piece with some decorative ridges. Think of it as basically shape of the sole of a shoe, with an embossed letter "A" on it. First try. Create three polylines that follow the correct curves, duplicate and flip, weld and fill. Oops. Only part of it fills. Error message comes up. Edges vanish, leaving just vertices in space. Try to select one, Carrara locks up, force quit. Okay. Try again with lofting. First loft makes a bad scrambled mess. Undo. Carrara crashes. Again, this time selecting only part of the curve. Loft works fine. Try to finish the curve. "Can't add edge to polymesh. Can't add point to edge. Can't do this operation on filled polygon. Empty before trying again." Lousy advice. CRASH! Okay, forget polylines. Apparently the tool is put there just to make fun of people like me. Start again with a closed polyline for the outline of the pedal. Fill that. Select part of the edge and perform "extract along." Once more. Adjust the extracted edges....the shape is coming around but Carrara added a few extra vertices during extraction (vertices not in the original.) I delete one. Carrara locks up. Force quit again. If only box modeling would work for this model! But it's really the wrong shape...I'd be spending far too much time tweaking to try to get those curves. Or maybe I could do it in spline. Except spline does ass-ugly meshes, and Carrara's nasty new habits often don't allow you to clean up a bad mesh. Back to the saved file. Manage to clean up without Carrara crashing...well, more than once or twice. Now I can finally move to the next portion; to lift up the embossed portion to make the decorative shape. Select, extrude....oops, the center didn't extrude. No problem; flatten out the center, select that, make an extrusion. CRASH. Okay, I understand that there are some sub-optimal modeling methods. But why is it THEIR problem if I chose to use one once in a while? And if there is only one true way, then maybe they could TELL YOU WHICH ONE IT WAS AND TAKE THE TOOLS YOU DON'T WANT US TO USE OUT OF THE SOFTWARE? I used to be able to make models in Carrara. Since version 5, it's been frustrating crap. Great tools, but it refuses to apply the old ones, scrambles meshes at will, or just locks up entirely. And you just can't walk away....all those nifty tools, all those handy manipulators and camera controls...you just can't leave them behind and go back to the old way (the old way that actually, you know, WORKED. All in all, I think I got a hell of a lot more work done before I "upgraded."