I guess this thread is actually about "if you could choose a man to look like who would it be?" Well if that's the case I"d surely choose Clint Eastwood
If sculpting I'd choose zbrush, if painting textures I'd choose 3dcoat. I use 3dcoat at work and zbrush/3dcoat at home, so feel pretty comfortable with both.
Rare, really? This has always happened to me, in every install. Even if I choose one of the predefined bookmarks for a given ortho camera, like choosing right or left.
I'd try modifying particle parameters in Kismet. You can choose what variables you want to edit in Kismet by choosing particle parameter type distributions for them in Cascade.