Ok, enough bleeding. I need to ask an important question: I've been thinking about upgrading to (let me spell it out in full) Blender - any thoughts
Never been a better time to make the switch to Blender, in particular with the upcoming v3 release around the corner. You will like many things, and vice versa you will have to get used to a different way of thinking compared to LW as well. It's best to do a small but exhaustive project in B to find your bearings.
The new roadmap was just posted:
https://code.blender.org/2021/10/blender-3-x-roadmap/
Good times. You will be shocked by the openness of communication between the Blender Foundation, its developers, and the users compared to Newtek. I met and talked shop with Ton and the developers at various occasions this past decade, and they're super friendly and engaging.
Check out the Blender Cloud, and perhaps consider signing up to sponsor Blender's development. I did along time ago, and the information and files on there are very helpful and interesting. Where else can you get direct insight at the production side of things and access the production files (but being in a production yourself ;-) )?
The LW2B Facebook group may be helpful:
A support group for Lightwave users who want to move to Blender!
www.facebook.com
Also, look into Houdini as a companion app. Blender and Houdini make a good combo, and the indie version of Houdini is very affordable. Word of warning: Houdini takes some getting used to

. But where Blender stops, Houdini starts, and vice versa. They complement each other nicely, in my opinion.
If you already render your work in a different render engine (such as Octane, or so) chances are you can continue using that render engine in Blender. Definitely look into Eevee for some realtime rendering goodness, and into alternatives like Renderman, ProRender, and LuxCoreRender. Or even Redshift, which is now also available for Blender. Or Vray. Sky is the limit, lots of choices.
Avoid pouring too much time or money initially into purchasing all sorts of add-ons: most add-ons merely package existing functionality in a wrapper of increased usability. That said, a few commercial plugins do make life so much better (Hardops and BoxCutter for hard surface modeling, for example). Don't forget to check out the free collection of built-in addons. Many are great, if not essential. A few free plugins make life much easier for users coming from other DCCs: Kekit, TexTools, UVPackMaster, Miratools, WMesh, - all free.
That should get you started. Enjoy the ride!