I hope DAZ Studio is a smashing success but I won't get onto the messiah bandwagon just yet. DAZ is subject to the same pitfalls as every other company bringing out a new product. They have made great models but a complex application is an entirely new ballgame. Their customer service, comittment to quality, etc. will stand them in good stead but it remains to be seen how things will work out. There's a big difference between something like a mesh and a 3D application. From what I've read, bugs even became a factor as they moved into more complex figures like Vicky 3. Expect that to be multiplied with Studio. I'm not saying they can't pull it off, I just think we need to have realistic expectations, at least in the short term. As for CL, hopefully if things get too bad, someone else will buy Poser and continue to develop it. The continuing competition would only help Make Studio better. My guess is that Poser 6 would be a complete rewrite. It sounds like there's only so much they can fix in Poser 5 from a practical standpoint. The holdover bugs from Poser 4 seem to indicate that that the way the code is structured, fixing some things would require such a major effort that a rewrite is the sensible way to go, while trying to fix the worst crash causing bugs via service packs. Now, they should have done this from the beginning and why they didn't I don't know. Poser Artist sounds like a gamble, but not necessarily a completely stupid one. If it's simply Poser 4 with a new name, that makes no sense. On the other hand, if the streamline Poser 4, strip out some things like animation, the grouping tool, joint parameters, etc. and sell it cheap, it might work. No one here would buy it, but the key is to grab a new market that mey exist. There may be a lot of people out there who would love to do Naked Vicky in a Temple but who definitely don't fit into the artist/computer graphics category. There are a lot of people who will buy an inexpensive image editor to play with their photos but who wouldn't dream of buying Photoshop. At the very least, it will be interesting.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken