There appears to be an age "gap" in my experience! Pokemon is another one of those areas where I must have been on some other planet somewhere! Just call me old.
On the subject of 3D, well, I was "sold" a while ago, chose POVray and never really tried anything else. I've looked at some of the tools but I don't feel qualified to comment all that much - but I guess I will !
What I can say is that most tools seem to be GUI based and that can be frustrating since there is that additional "layer" between you, the creator, and the virtual "thing" you are creating. I'm an old electronics engineer and I learned stuff when chips were things in a box. I was happy converting to ABEL to write logic in boulean code and managed the leapfrog to VHDL where the software people decided to make it all "look like" software but when they started plunking a GUI on top I started to lose my "feeling" of control. There's places where a GUI is indispendisble and the VHDL GUI I used had a couple of bits I used but the real design stuff I did "by hand" as it were.
POVray being a language allows you to model with the best feeling for "control" that I know of, there may be others. Somebody produced a GUI or two for it, one was Moray and I tried that and hated it. When I make a box I know precisely where it is and I can't accidently select it and move it on a screen, I know when I group things that I haven't missed something and that my textures inside are exactly as I wrote it. GUI progs can do all the same things but my level of "confidence" is much lower. Again, just call me old!
Being a language rather than a screen for pushing shapes around on means that you can write reasonably complex trigonometric functions, have randomness, and conditional loops and the like. Your crowd in the stands could be randomly generated little figures in a while loop allowing them all to be in different positions and actions. I've been modelling my parents' house (on and off) and I could have done the roof slopes as a single flat surface with a "normal" and a bitmap texture but I coded it with individual roof tiles. The house is old and the tiles are all a bit wonky and differing shades - if I worked at it I could randomly place randomly chipped/broken tiles in the mix, it would just be a few more lines of code...

Sketchup looks easy (and I'm guessing it has complexities) but when I've deconstructed some I was a tad dissapointed with the level of texturing seen, maybe that was just the application they were made for... hrm.

Ultimately you have to look at the results of the product and decide if that's what you want to create. By default, Sketchup seems to be used usually with a line around all the edges, POV doesn't do that (and I'm not sure it can, easily) - on the other hand POV can produce brilliantly realistic effects for very little work (by you).

Damn! I sound like a salesman! Sadly there's no commission for a free product!!
cheers!