I'm gonna be a little bit biased but 3ds Max is going to have the most varied set of animation tools available. It was used in some scenes of Pixar's
The Incredibles and for the opening shots in
Avatar. That's two really different styles of film. We used Max for modeling all the 3D objects in Star Rangers. Look around the web in places like
maxunderground.com and
maxplugins.de and you'll see how much stuff is available for the program. The more people who use a platform, the more tools are available and the more likely it'll have the capabilities you want.
-Tom