praxis22 makes a good point. It's much easier to rewrite an application than to create it from scratch. You have a near perfect specification to work from. Curious Labs have the more difficult decision of enhancing the original or doing a re-write. The obvious advantage of enhancing the original is that you have code that works and you can bolt on the new features. How easy this is depends not just how modular the original code is, but how that code fits in with where you want to take the application. The commercial advantage of enhancing the original is that it should take less development time and, hence, will be cheaper. When Curious Labs made the decision to make Poser 5 they presumably knew they had some financial problems, they didn't have any direct competitors and Poser 4 was the most pirated 3d application (so I read in 3D world), so it was obviously a popular and relatively easy application to use. So it doesn't seem strange to me that they went for the enhancement option with increased copy security rather than a complete rewrite. The copy security was bought in and was a disaster. It's obvious that the pre-release testing was not done with this security feature in place. I have to wonder how much of Poser 5's current problems was due to the copy security and I imagine the solicitors of each company are still working on this case! I haven't checked how much memory Poser 5 takes when it's initialised compared to Poser 4, but I guess it's a lot. It appears to load up a lot of extra features instead of loading them in as needed. The majority of Poser's customers are enthusiasts on a tight budget, so we are not going to have the best machines. W98 struggled with Poser 4, I'm amazed some have got Poser 5 to work with it. To be fair, those of us that have a working Poser 5, find that most of the bugs in Poser 4 have been fixed and we have some new features. If your OS and machine can handle Poser 5 and you only do the things Poser 4 does, it does them better than Poser 4. But, the new features are really badly documented. For example, the material editor is great when you suss it, but the manual covers it appallingly! DAZ Studio have taken the second option, well they didn't have a choice did they! They have gone for a modular design, the long term option which they can build on. They are building in the capabilities of Graphics Cards. They are already in the Poser communities eye with their excellent products, customer support reputation and a very good web site on which to sell their product. Their product won't have all the capabilities of Poser 4 when it is released, but, if they get the shell right , it shouldn't take too long for them to match first Poser 4 and then Poser 5. If they allow other companies to write plug-ins, this process will be even quicker. If DAZ give the basic shell and renderer free, then most of us could be using DAZ Studio along side Poser. As DAZ Studio functionality increases, Posers share of CPU time would decrease -assuming we can afford and want to purchase the new modules. Curious Labs have the market now and I'm sure they have a cunning plan to stay in business, be it an SR4 release, Poser 6 or writing modules for DAZ Studio. :0)