"But I only see a handful of merchants taking advantage of this most awesome feature of Poser5 - like we're all still married to Pro Pack and are scared to take a leap forwards."

That's part of it. I don't mean to offend anyone, but most of the Poser merchants are not all that technically skilled and it shows. Clothing fits badly, the meshes are a mess, the included morphs are minimal, the textures are bad etc. Thats not everyone, there are some people turning out simply amazing work. My point is that Many merchants really don't have a good grip on the technical stuff, so I think making the leap to P5 is either beyond them or simply to scary to contemplate.

There is also pride involved. So many people predicted that P5 would never be good. That the firefly rendered would never be useful and that any day now Daz Studio was going to change the world. To start working on P5 stuff now would be to admit the obvious - that P5 is a good product and that Daz Studio is nowhere near ready.

"but I mostly broker with a site that doesn't support P5, so I can't include the P5 mat poses in my for-sale stuff"

Is this for real? I know that one well known site does not support P5, but if it turns out that they are actively preventing merchants from including >optional< support for P5 that is really going to signal to me that they just don't "get it". Come on Daz, say that isn't so!?

"Why? Because I have to do more than half the work of making stuff work well in my preferred application, so why should I spend my money on merchants who don't care about me? "

Perfectly well said. I'll still spend $$$ on those few merchants who are SO GOOD that it is worth the work to get their stuff working right... but the borderline stuff? no way. Not anymore.

"Plus, as Cresent pointed out, you're not really sure what you're going to get with Firefly."

Welcome to the world of real live rendering engines. To me? Its a worthwhile trade off. The P4 renderer lacks so many of the basic, bare necessity tools needed to use it for serious work (for me) that it isn't even really an option. Max, Softimage, Maya, Firefly - any decent engine will give you dramtically different (better) results than it can show you in real time.