really depends heavily though Otaku...
Lightwave in my experience really isn't for a professional atmosphere unless the employees already like it to begin with.
It's modeler is not even close to as complex as Softimage/Maya/Max - its tools area takes just as much of the screen as Max meaning you need a pretty high resolution to actually work in it properly - it's inability to work with highpolygon scenes as the culling routine is one of the worst in the business and the fact that it only has 4 layers to work with as opposed to the 64 that both XSI and Maya have (XSI giving you something called quick layers, which are 4 top layers which allow you to flick)
having the animator in a sperate program is not just annoying its down right stupid, it means you have to have double the resources to work on a model's editing and animation at the same time ... its animation systems interaction is very ropey in areas which means you have to end up relying far too much on 3rd party plugins and the programs own rather than your own skill as an animator.
overall to be honest even if someone told me i had to work with Lightwave on a job i wouldn't touch it with a 10ft barge pole, if the Interface actually made up for the lacking it has in other areas it wouldn't be so bad. Problem is the interface is more complex than Softimage's and without even 1/4 of the tools to warrent this it makes it one of the poorest designs imo.
Not the mention you do exactly have a grand amount of control over the matrials for rendering, not even close to what XSI/Maya/Max give you. Sure you can produce nice generic results ... but i can produce just as nice generic results in trueSpace - this doesn't mean it is a useful tool for CG or Games development, this simply means its idiot proof.
In Maya/Max/XSI your capable of useing realtime shading materials, and coding them realtime with multiple levels which can be combined at render time ... you add this with the layering abilities they each have and the multiple rendering pass and what you end up with are extremely useful tools to produce CG work in layers to be finalised later in Aftereffects.
Although Mental Ray is a nice Render'r to be honest it has nothing on the other Render'r available.
for XSI/Maya you have Pixar Renderman, which has the original Shader language built-into it ... might seem a little redundant but with the fact that thier GI has over 5more years development in the workplace now including ILMs OpenEXR Specifications, it has some of the most realistic shading there is for surfaces.
Not to fast though, but atleast utilises your Graphics Cards better.
Arnold aka Messiah:Renderer for Max/Maya/XSI is probably THE best third party renderer available ... enhanced Materials, proper lighing effects within materials allow you to declare numbers of photons, where they're comming from. It has a complete dependant shadowing system which produces shadows based on the depth and strength of the lighting rather than based on the type of shadow you want. You get none of that hard line showing effects when the indirectional light would cancel it out niether.
Add to this the ability to use scripted shaders, so if you need someone to sweat rather than using a particle or simple animated texture ... you can use the new Time Shader abilities of the GeForceFX series but on any card - it allows you to then create a bead of sweat, have it work its way down the geometry whilst getting depth from per-pixel lighting and getting caustics from the GI. Probably the most impressive Renderer on the market is that.
Brazil for Max is really what the original Max Renderer SHOULD have been, no longer the more technically advanced renderer on the market, it still does have a unique takes on everything and its softer touch look to everything can really help to bring a scene to life
That said the Max5 and Max6 renderers are FAR FAR superior to thier predessors... Max6 in particular finally gets a decent AntiAliasing setup and full control over the Radiosity.
