I know Lightwave 5 is old by today's standards, but am I wrong in thinking that someone could still turn out some respectable work in it? Your renders look pretty good (I especially like the middle one of the buildings), and with what you know now, you could probably improve on them.
Oh, absolutely - whilst LW5 is lacking some some of the more recent advances in 3D modeling and rendering (global illumination, HDRI, UV mapping, normal maps, displacements and sub-division surfaces being the most noticeable) - it still does 90% of what most 3D jobs are - modeling, surfacing, lighting and rendering - in fact, it'd be interesting to do something in Amiga LightWave just to see what it's still capable of
A lot of it just comes down to tricks you learn over the years using these tools - there's ways of faking global illumination using spinning light setups - volume effects (like the smoke in the lights from that police car thing) can be faked with procedural textures.
LightWave's biggest limitation on the Amiga is render times though - I remember rendering the Bladerunner animation that came with the LW content - on my 68060 it took a week - it takes less than an hour on my i7