I really do agree with the idea that some basic infrastructure improvements are more valuable than fancier render engines, etc. With Shade LE, there are better rendering and modeling tools than we'll ever likely see in Poser itself - at least Poser at a reasonable price. As for the library thing, using compressed files at runtime is an interesting solution, though frankly Java's /jar files are the only application of the idea I'm familiar with. Personally, I've always wanted to be able to place everything in one folder (or folder tree) for a product, character, props, poses, geometry etc. Some files like reflection maps and .objs need to be in a common location and referenced but a whole lot of them don't. I think one main cause of the current situation lies with the original design's insistence on accesing files by location rather than by the file type. The only problem I see with using compressed files is that if you want to modify something, say create a variation on a texture, you have to unarchive it, modify, and then put any changes back in the archive. P3DO already has most of what you want except the uninstall. There are one or two uninstallers available but AFIK, they can only handle what's explicitly referenced in the file they're deleting. To do a complete uninstall, you need to know everything that was installed. That would be easy for Content Paradise or an .exe installer to record but for .zips, you really need a custom unzip application. The zip labraries are free, tack on a database and it should be fairly easy to implement. The trickier part is dealing with the situations where people choose to install files in places other than the zip folder structure.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken