ChristianZ wrote: Well, I think we should not forget the historical dimension of this discussion :)
I am using Cinema4D since version 6 and at that time there were only few competitors in the same market as compared to today. C4D originally came from the Amiga Homecomputer platform and was established on Windows and Mac after a rewrite. It became the 3D-software of choice for people who did everything on their own on relatively cheap hardware.
Maya on the other hand was born in a much more "industrialized" environment at Alias|Wavefront and initialy run only on IRIX, the Unix-operating system of pricey SGI workstations.
In recent years we have seen price drops on hardware and sometimes also rather dramatically in software, Lightwave and Maya as typical examples. Cinema4D instead was getting bigger and more expensive, and the expectations and demands from the customers have developed likewise...
Personally, I still like the ease of use of C4D and I will continue to upgrade at least next year. At the same time I started to learn Maya some months ago and there I enjoy a better integration of the different modules and a better support by Nextlimit, for example, but the grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence...
I agree with you 100%, but I'm also playing round with demo versions of max (by the way, are max 6 and 7 licenses still available, just wonderring if I could save money instead of buying the 9th v.)?