"OK how about "built from the ground up"?"

How about it. I don't particularly mind that. As a programmer I know that while sometimes tossing all the code out is a good idea - but on a huge/complex application that needs to retain compatibility and has a large user base it usually isn't the answer.

Starting over with a blank file for Poser5 would have been an insanely silly thing to do. Then again, I never saw anyone from CL say that they were going to do that.

"Clearly Poser 5 is NOT a new build. It IS Poser 4 (pro) with some bells and whistles."

• A new render engine with significant new abilities (ray tracing, transparency, reflections, micropoly displacement and so on)
• A full on new materials system
• A full soft body dynamics engine
• A full hair engine
• An entirely new set of abilities for facial modeling
• Dramatically improved library handling

Funny, those strike me as much, much more than a few "bells and whistles"... but maybe I am just easy to please.

"You can't blame people for not believing what other things they might hear then."

Well, I certainly can point out that some people didn't hear anything that actually was said, and are too caught up in the drama to see what is actually there... and that some of the promises they "heard" came only from inside their own desires.

So far the only promise I have seen that didn't happen is some free animal models and the mistaken idea that somehow CL promised to throw away years worth of development and code.

Not that bad in my mind.