I know this thread is mostly dead, but I had the reply sitting in my drafts folder so here it is . Feel free to ignore :)

Obviously I use Poser a lot, and I love the tool. I have seen some people do totally outstanding art with Poser, so obviously I feel Poser is a artistic tool.

However, you have to keep in mind what kind of "art" most 3D websites are talking about. On CGTalk they are dedicated to the art of making 3D images - not really to 3D images as art if you get the distinction. They are there to talk about the techniques of modeling, texturing lighting and composition. With extremely few exceptions the vast, vast majority of Poser images only really represent composition and possibly lighting. It's just not going to impress people who are working hard on learning how to model, texture and so on.

Hell, one of the reasons I use Poser for commercial work is because it let's me get high impact without having to do a lot of the work myself. That's why Poser is a commercially important tool :)

As my own skills and understanding of 3D has grown, I simply have to say that all things considered I respect the effort that went into modeling a figure and doing original textures more than I do the effort that I put into buying Victoria. Just like when I see someone with a totally awesome custom car I am more impressed if they did most of the work themselves rather than simply buying components and having a shop put it together.

• Does this matter in how I evaluate it as ART? No. Art - the emotional impact - isn't gauged by effort.
• Does it matter in how much I go "wow"? Yeah, it does. Just like that custom car.

A fair amount of the reaction many in the higher end community have is simply this... Poser is simply not relevant to the skills they are trying to develop or hone. In their view it isn't a matter of artistic merit - because they are a community about skillets, not really one about art. Just like they wouldn't be favorable to a photograph. It wouldn't matter how good the photo was artistically, it just isn't relevant.

Now there are a fair number of bastards out there and snobs... just like there are people in Poser (we see them here) who go to those forums and go off about how their Poser4 render (and a bad one at that) is so much cooler than their best work and it only took an hour or whatever. This includes a bunch of people who dismiss their criticism as being jealousy that the Poser folks do better work without spending all that money.

Idiocy isn't limited to software choice :)