Im comin from using Animation:Master, and if any of you know A:M, you'll know exactly why I switched.. You would think the coders purposly screwed up the code just so it would crash every 5 seconds... Its also very limited.
To me, maya is great because:
1) Everyone uses it - cant be bad if it's one of the most popular out there.
2) Its only crashed on me I think3 thimes, but I was doing complex things...
3) You can do everything with it, except pay bills.