My opinion on the problems with Poser 5's release is that CL didn't have a very good grasp on their "voice of the customer". They didn't understand what we wanted in many cases, and they didn't properly respond to what we wanted in others. For instance, it seems they didn't realize that most people wanted a real-time preview (OpenGL or something similar), or they didn't realize how MUCH of a killer that would be if they didn't put it in. Myself, and I imagine many others, just assumed before release that would be included, because it's standard in most comparable aps. It didn't occur to me that they WOULDN'T include it until the release. I assumed point lights would be included; they apparently didn't realize people had this assumption.

Then there's the places where they did know what we wanted, but had poor implementation. They knew we wanted a better render engine. This would have been a good place to license from a third party, but instead they reinvented the wheel, and the initial release was buggy and flawed. (Personally, with SR4, I like Firefly now, but I just upgraded to P5, so what do I know?) They knew we wanted a better way to do skirts and loose clothing. The cloth room is a great tool. The problem there is that, by the very natural of the calculations, it's very resource and time intensive. Many of the things we want could have been handled by adding support for multiple parents or siblings.

And again with "voice of the customer" there's the places where CL thought it would be cool, and their customers didn't find it to be value added. Face Room, for instance. My reaction, and that of many others, was "what's that about?" If they had included DAZ figure compatibility, it might have been useful, but without that, it's just a toy; not something I'm going to pay extra for. Same with content paradise. I know where all those sites and then some are.

Of course, there's some places where they very clearly had the voice of the customer, and chose to ignore it. Remember the registering/unlocking thing in the first release? They knew from previous software releases that their audience had almost NO tolerance for that, and they put it in anyway.

IMHO, the "ease of use" and lack thereof issue is less to do with the basic program, and more to do with the GUI. I'm sick of the cutesy unique interface, the rooms, the library system that was intuitive to someone who wasn't me. Go to something standard. A normal explorer-style interface for the library that allows me to put things anywhere, and move them around inside the program. At least give an option to replace the tabs with a menu item somewhere; screen real estate is at a premium in any graphics ap, and that's a hundred pixels at the top of my screen I could put to better use. There are better controls interfaces out there; base off one of those.

And, I would like to see backwards compatibility be kept without being chained to antiquated ways of handling figures. Each Poser file writes the version number at the top; use it. For instance, hypothetically, use a more modern boning and weighting method for new figures, but if a figure you load up says "version 4.0", revert to the old joint parameter and blend zone method. You've got that code anyway. Then those who are technically minded could rebone in the setup room and save back as a new figure using the new method, and those who aren't or who (like most of us) have oodles of older files and don't want to abandon their investment can do so.