I agree that you can better work mainly on your design skills and creativity in this phase, and go along with one tool of your choice to get your designs ready for prototyping/production.
The disadvantage of Rhino is that it’s not parametric, so you can’t dynamically alter the dimensions of your designs much. Wrong! 
It has become possible to do parametric design with the recent (and free!) Grasshopper plugin, which works fantastic. It is a completely different way of modeling but I would highly recommend learning it if you’re already familiar with Rhinoceros. It opens up a whole new realm of possibilities.
And I can’t think of a single reason why Canadians would use different software tools. Is that even true for USA and Europe? Maybe Alias is used more in the US, I don’t hear much of it over here, but that’d probably be one of only a few differences.