the reason PLE is a good help is because you can USE it. I honestly could care less about the quality of the help documents. EVERY software's help docs suck. That's where communities like US come in.

As for the huge cost of Maya, sure it's not cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but compared to all the other high-end 3D apps, it's one of the cheaper ones to obtain at $2000 US. For Complete, in any case, which has more then enough to sustain anyone. That's what I use.