"her reflection that you see."

Ah, I see. Cute. Doesn't change anything :)

"If they are, the price of shade is going to be too much to pay for those three keywords."

But it won't be too much to pay for a good rendering engine that is superior to POV and comes with an actual user interface, full on modeling and animation functions and all the rest of it. WHiel the PD front ends for POV are interesting in their own way, like Blender they simply fall far short of what the commercial folks put out in even the mid range.

Hey, if POV does what you need then more power to ya, go forth render and multiply. It's a moderately competent render engine that while somewhat behind the current state of the art is still serviceable... especially for the price. You even have utilities that will let you use Poser files with it.

What I am unsure of is why it would be important or useful for Curious Labs to take on the support problems of having to write a converter and do customer support for it when they have access to better technology that they can control, as opposed to an open source project that would not in any way put much priority on their needs.

What, exactly, would be the business advantage of switching to POV? They lost capabilities that are are the moment in extremely high demand, they lose their ability to direct the development of the renderer and they have to then support it.

There is absolutely no upside for CL that I can see.

"Working on another render, inside four walls with a ceiling on it, one point light, not a (giggle, snort) spotlight. "Full house" render, media, radiosity, maybe by tomorrow."

I must be missing something, is this render (or the features you list) supposed to be an advocacy for POV? The features that POV has are far from unique or particularly impressive... and they fall far short of those included in the high end systems that are the next logical jump up from Shade and Firefly.

I LIKE POV. I played with it a long time ago and I still check in on it from time to time... but my urge to use it as the wonder tool for all things rendered faded when I saw what a real 3d integrated application can do for me.

A common problem of some Open Source advocates is that they fail to realize that it is rarely a good idea for a company to open all it's code and that in specialized areas with high R&D costs (like 3D) the OSS community simply isn't usually the best way to get the code done.