The various tools in Silo make it easy to select and edit your mesh. Selection tools such as select ring/loop and expand selection have consistently saved me massive headaches while modeling. Turn edge, create polygon, split polygon, and the split tool are surprisingly easy to learn and incorporate.

As a beginner myself, I understand the importance of community, and Silo has one of the best communities I've seen. The Nevercenter forums are always active and it is possible to learn a great deal about 3D Modeling without even owning SILO.
Silo tutorials and reasonably priced training dvds are many, and unhealthy egos are few. Nevercenter also seems to understand the importance of the community and is very open to user feedback. They show this with such things as adding a 'feature request' section to their website, and updating the site content rather consistently.

As with everything, Silo does have a downside. While it is an incredible subdivision modeling package, Silo is not a complete solution. If you are looking to fully render your meshes or rig and animate them you'll have to look elsewhere. However, Silo does help this process by allowing you to easily export your meshes in a wide variety of file types. There is a facility to send models to render into Renderman compliant rendering solutions like Aqsis but this is not really for someone new to modeling. Lack of a strong object management system is a little frustrating when you get a very complex model going and the absence of a history panel/stack is noticeable. These things are regularly discussed at the forum and I assume will be remedied in the soon-to-be-released Version 2.0