Lightwave is dying? I am a customer and beta-tester. They publish a couple sometimes more beta versions every week. They work very hard to improve it, to make it even more stable as it is. If I send a bug-report then they reply personally. It does not feel like it is dying.
The new renderer is that fast and advanced, it is probably the best built-in renderer you can find in all 3d-apps.

Ello: Cinema 4d has a sculpting tool? This is new to me. I have to check that.

Firoball: Truespace is a nice software and you can model quite fast if you are used to it. But animation is a bit buggy. But the best way is to try it yourself.

XSI is a bit expensive now, they dont have the foundation edition anymore. Probably because of the deal with Autodesk. So if you really need an all-in-one solution then you should check C4D, Lightwave and Blender. All of them are affordable and have tools for modeling, animation, rigging and rendering. I decided to use Lightwave because it is more affordable than C4D and at that time it had built in support for fur/hair, texture-baking and normal-mapping and C4D did not. But this may have changed now.
But still I dont like the upgrade policy of Maxon (C4D). I am still an active user of Bodypaint 3d (Maxon) and they wanted me to pay almost the full price for an upgrade with only very little new functionality. I could have bought a new license for almost no new features. Probably they want to become rich very fast.