Well when i say "not on par", it's what i explain after : LightWave is the tool of choice for 90% of what you have to do in "highend 3D".
It's fast (in fact it's faster than any other soft to get what you want...) but when you need something really extreme (like feature film...) it's not as powerful as Maya/XSI/Houdini.
That's why the primary target of LightWave is TVseries where it really shines.
Because of the tight deadlines (remember, it's fast...) and also because the highend quality isn't required in TV shows.
Plus the fact that the renderer is extremely powerful, fast (even in GI renderings with the latest 9.5) and it allows to build renderfarms at low costs, being able to render on 999 nodes with only 1 licence !
As it is now, the only missing thing in the renderer to be on par with PRMan or MentalRay even for highend rendering is the bucket renderer and the Micropolygon displacement.
For the rest, it's really really impressive.
As for specific shows, i can't tell you exactly who did what, but "Ghost in the shell" as well as its sequel (don't remember the name right now...) was done using LightWave, even for the rendering part.
Cheers,
Laurent aka Tartiflette
