This reads interesting. So how does it stand now? Can it do texture baking including lighting and shaders? Can it display spec and normal maps in realtime? Can it render normal maps? Is animation reliable? Is there FK and IK animation? What about particles, physics, soft and hard bodies, fluids?
How is the uv-tool? Is there some kind of automatic pelt-mapping, uv-relaxation, atlas mapping?
What about morph-maps?

Texture baking - no
Spec Maps - yes, depends of used shader
Normal Maps - yes, depends of used shader

Rendering, and with that the shaders, depends of course of used render engine.
Modeler: Lightworks, Virtualight, Dribble. Dribble is a Renderman renderer.
Workspace: Vray (not longer available), Realtime, Kerkythea, Indigo, Yafaray4trueSpace

Make Normal Maps from High Poly to Low Poly mesh - yes, with a plugin ...

Animation - well, depends what you mean with reliable. bones are more stable now than in 7.6 when you mean this. 7.6 was IK1. 7.61 comes with IK2. It has finally arrived with the latest Beta. But there is surely still more than one quirk left. Teething problems. Not enough time to test it all, let alone fix it because of stopped development. I have on the other hand even with 7.6 made a decent walkcycle, and have exported it then to MED. I would label it as working.
Sure there is FK and IK.
Physics yes
Soft Bodies no
No particles so far
Fluids - there is a Fluid Sim Importer by a plugin developer that imports Blender Fluid Simulation
UV Tools still lacks of an useful unwrapping algorythm, UV tools are useful to cleanup the unwrap besides that. Numerical control ...
Not sure what you mean with Morph Maps. Morphing? Morphing is part of Animation, and possible.

For creating lightmaps i use Giles, for baking the textures together i use The Gimp. Both freeware. Unwrapping i do with Roadkill, also freeware, and Ultimate Unwrap. A few bucks.

I see. This looks like a powerful pipeline. It took you probably a long time to learn all these applications and is not very comfortable but in the end you can do a lot this way. And last but not least it was very cheap, almost free of charge.

Well, I bought gamespace long time ago. And the main reason I did this, was texture baking.

There is no way for texture baking in the higher version??

No, unfortunately not. Those kind of tools would've come next to add, now that the basetools are implemented into new core. Really a shame that they stop the baby at this point.

Have any of you ever played with Carrara Pro? Version 6.2 was on a coverdisk for 3D Artist magazine and the upgrade to version 7 is pretty cheap for Daz Platinum Club members.

It renders beautifully, but you need a 3rd party plugin to bake textures. In any event, I bring it up because at first glance it is the absolute opposite of Truespace's cluttered workspace. Carrara's interface is very streamlined. Thoughts?

It does not export FBX animations, anyway
For modern engines this is a big issue

Yes its all about the Pipeline!!!!! now where is my ecstasy....testing testing...

Ever try going from Carrara to Daz Studio to FBX?

Does that pipeline work....or is it riddled with bugs too?