I'd say go for P5, as well. While there -is- a lot more to the program, and thus a steeper learning curve than with P4, it isn't all shoved in your face at once. The Pose window of P5 is practically identical to the main window of P4; the only functional difference you can see there is in the libraries window on the right side. P5 has =much= better library management than P4 does (easier to read text, for one thing), and the ability to link P5 to multiple runtimes outside of the Poser program. Not something that seems -needed- at first, but after a few months of scarfing freebies from the web, and finding -all- the sites that have pretty toys for sale at incredible prices, you'll find that ability to be a godsend (at the moment, I have a 22 gig external runtime...and mine is not the biggest, by a long shot.... :P ). Things change once you move off of that front panel, though. The material room, once you wrap your mind around the GUI interface, is easy to use...at least as far as texture and bump maps go. P5, due to the rocky start it had, is only now really getting the attention of the community's tinkerers and tweakers. The material room uses shaders to create and extremely broad set of effects, and right now we are in the stage of figuring out just what can be done with what nodes. Both the hair room and the cloth room can be monsters; each of them is actually a plugin from the high end market (I can't remember what the hair room is off the top of my head, but the cloth room is actually Stitch, most used for dynamic cloth in 3D Studio Max) adapted for Poser. But you don't have to go into them until you are ready, and the purchaseable prducts that use them also include the setup files, so you essentially just have to tell the program to 'calculate dynamics'. The setup room is the same as you get with Pro Pack. Content Paradise....isn't worth messing with, and so should be ignored (there are ways to remove it, as well, if you are comfortable hacking into .ini and .xml files. Not for a beginner, though). Another thing to consider is that Curious Labs has announced that they are working on P6, with something like a year's development schedule. If CL keeps it's past practices, then there will be a decent discount for and upgrade from the last Poser to the new one.