I know it’s just a matter of opion but what do you think? 
I’m voting maya even though I don’t like Alias as a company…I obtained the Maya 3 full cd set and they won’t let me license it to use it so I have Maya cds just collecting dust now. Lightwave is cool but I personally like the flow of Maya judging by the PLE and Lightwave Discovery Edition. Plus, Maya now has mental ray which is a suh-weet renderer. I just wish they’d let me license maya 3…i mean it’s old but it’d be a good learning tool with no render limits…grr.
Patrick
XSI 
Seriously, if those were my only two choices, then if I had to choose for a personal project, I’d go for Lightwave.
If I were setting up a studio and money didn’t matter, or I expected to work at an FX studio in the future, it would be Maya.
But if I can pick ANY app? Well, then, in basically every situtation, I would choose XSI. Although I still like Blender. Blender never managed to make me angry in one way or another, and only pleasantly surprised me with what it’s capable of doing.
Oh, and Wings3D is a cool modeler.
I’m going the Cinema 4D and Silo route. Since Pixel Corps uses Cinema 4D (W00t! can’t wait to start!) I -wanted- to get XSI but after selling some programs I got all my damn bills at once so I just used my left over money for Pixel Corps enrollment…better investment now that I think about it! Haha 
Another little fact: You have to pay more if you want to farm mentalray, whereas lightwave allows you unlimited farming with its renderer.
Cheers,
b01c
Yeah, if the renderfarm thing is important to you, LW is a terrific choice. Unlimited nodes out of the box is hard to argue with.
As for me, I’m working on an XSI project that will eventually require a few rendering boxes, but it will be a while before I get to that stage. When I do, I’ll just pay the upgrade price for a seat of XSI|Essentials to get four more MentalRay nodes.
Of course, I’m the honest type who wouldn’t take advantage of the fact that Foundation has no dongle, and isn’t locked to a particular machine.
See I don’t do much animating though. I don’t need anything with fancy animation stuff.
maya must burn
–artz0r-- :<