Ok im not a programmer
so can you name any
3D program that was NOT hardware accelerated
or had NO openGL
but effectively added that ability later??
in a worthwhile implementation
and please share why you think CL Never did this

No offense but you're right, your not :)

3DS Max STILL ships with a software driver in addition to OpenGL and Direct3D for the view/manipulation of objects, and many production users use it rather than the other to. While OpenGL and Direct3D are crucial for games, there are circumstances when they do not suit the needs of a 3D application's pre-render visualization.

That being said, 3DS Max was not hardware accelerated at the beginning. Neither was Lightwave that I recall.

While I have never seen the Poser source code I have worked on several other applications (game engines and 3d apps) and it is usually a fairly straightforward architectural change to add an alternative preview engine. The trick is mapping your materials into the final output and handling the (sometimes severe) limitations of OpenGL and Direct3D.

As it is, the Poser program has already simulated a render API to handle the previews, stubbing that out and dumping the geometry into an alternative like OpenGL of D3D miht be a challenge but there is no reason in the world it would require a "ground up" re-write as such thing have almost nothing to do with the core of any 3D application I have ever seen.