The great, featured native rendering engine has been one of my main reasons for using LightWave. Don't let some of the newbie stuff you see online fool you – LW can help you make amazing, state-of-the-art work. A new PBR engine is due in the next version, which is exciting and keeps LW up to date with the competition. VPR viewport rendering and live displacement updates in GL is a good feature. Very powerful nodal texturing and shading features with loads of great official nodes as well as free plugins from 3rd parties. The modeling tools are very fluid and intuitive once you have some basic knowledge of how 3d modelling works. Animating is very simple and fast with a range of options such as editing graphs, dope sheets or scripting. Enthusiastic online community. Good, but simple integration with After Effects that I use all the time to combine 3d with 2d. Good support for various file types. Price is very competitive.

Lightwave has a fairly robust set of tools. It is open to 3rd party tools, and works well in a production setting. And produces very quick beautiful renders.

Almost everything. Seperate modeler and renderer. Simple interface.