[Sketchy]

You're right about Carrara as an all-in-one 3d app. It's got hidden powers even high-end ones lack. That's the problem: they are hidden. I haven't seen a lot of Car users doing a lot of mountainous, landscape pictures and stuff. Why? Most don't know how to use it. There's barely any learning resource about it. No one's doing any book or more tutorials. That goes with the shaders feature as well. It's got thousands of combinations, yet there's very little learning resource about them. It's frustrating having to discover everything by yourself which takes a lot of time.

Unlike in the Blender side, everything seems to be pointing in the right direction including proper documentation. Someone is even planning to release a book on Blender before the end of this year.