Hi Dale,
Many of the programs listed are the same as what I use at work so I try to maintain a personal license at home to keep up with new features as they come out. (I also make a lot of recommendations for work, so I keep pushing iPi Studio each time it gets a major feature.) :)
As for Vue, we use it regularly at work. Prior to 8, we mainly used it for creating matte paintings, but with version 8.0-8.5 the program became pretty awesome for animation and elements for compositing. The renderer was much faster and the AA and flickering issues are pretty much gone. With 8.0 you could finally export clouds with alpha channels, and for Lightwave users, it finally recognized modern .lwo formats with UV maps. At work we use Vue 8 xStream. I think we recently got 9 but I'll have to check. At home I'm using Vue 9 Infinite.
Here's a TV commercial we created recently that used Vue 8.5 xStream in Lightwave for all the environments:
Most Dangerous Hunts 2011The animation is keyframe and not mocap. We had a very small budget, schedule and crew to make this one. If we had the budget, we probably would have used mocap on this but our two animators did a great job considering the compressed schedule.
So to answer your question, yes recent versions of Vue have been great! I'll be using Vue 9 Infinite this weekend, and I'm sure it will be even better than 8.5.
G.
P.S., this was the job that I did some 'proof of concept' previs tests for using iPi Studio. We didn't use the mocap for previs because the required action wound up being very different from what I recorded and tracked, but the test was otherwise successful.
