"Can't help but wonder how much futher can we go...." Oh, there are MILES of road still ahead for Poser if Curious Labs decides to follow through with their current developments in P5. Dynamic hair, cloth, the P5 node-based materials, and Metaforms plugin are just mere glimpses of what the future can bring if Poser users are willing to accept them. So far, the people who use Poser for fun (or for still images only) don't seem to want or need such enhancements, but I believe this progression (geared towards animators) is the inevitable future of Poser, especially considering they are now owned by the parent company of Shade. However, it's been mentioned the concern over an increased price tag on the software should it continue to utilize more high-end features. To that, I say it's also an inevitability. All one needs to do is look at Shade, and how that is marketed... multiple versions for different levels of usability. Given the fact of who currently owns Curious Labs, one could predict the same kind of marketing will be applied to Poser in future releases. For example, there may be several versions of Poser 7 (I don't think we'll see it in P6 yet). One "Artist" version (which is now what they call Poser4), which is geared toward the hobbyist and still-image creator and has less high-end features, and a "Professional" or "Advanced" version, which will pack more high-end features geared toward the animation professional who can NOT resort to post-working the imperfections from their frames and depend on superior lighting/render quality and network capability in the software. One can be marketed at a lower cost, and the other (obviously) a much higher cost. I'll bet my shirt this is what is to come in the "near" future, which is why we were given a taste of it in P5. Personally, I think it would be a step in the right direction for the company financially as well.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.