The prices have come down a lot ... you can get the base edition for like $2.5k I think. The nice part, though, is they offer the Maya Personal Learning Edition for free, which is basically an almost 100% base edition (only missing some very esoteric things) that watermarks all your renders. www.aliaswavefront.com --- i think there's a link on the front page for it.

i agree about the freetime ... i love playing around with it, but it's very time consuming....

ms