"then wouldn't they encourage practicing how to get the most out of any program or technique that contributes to making the best image for the final result?" Well, in all fairness, there is a Bryce artist who posts to CGTalk on a fairly consistant basis, and has received awards and even an appearance in the prestigeous Expose book! His name is Rochr, and we all know him from this website as well. He's managed to overcome the stereotype most have towards Bryce users, and has even been approached by professional CG studios. One of the main problems is, the Poser community, perhaps more than any other, consists largely of people who have no interest in advancing their 3D skills beyond what is generally considered an "amateur" level, and only use the app as a hobby or for pure fun (which is perfectly fine). However, communities like CGTalk take 3D VERY seriously (most of them are either professionals in the industry or aspire to become professionals), and seeing as how so many Poser users tend to publish work in mass quantity (for evidence of this, just check how fast the galleries here rotate in new images), often without being scrutinous to detail or mindful of content and technique. Those communities who consist mostly of people who have aspirations of making a career out of it, pride themselves on educating the 3D community to progress their skills beyond a certain level, and tend to not want their galleries to become storage areas for 3D tits and ass. Having worked now professionally in 3D myself for the better part of 3 years, I can see their point. However, I also believe people who don't want to make a career from 3D should be allowed to have FUN with it if they want to. There's two sides to every story. ;-) Happy New Year!

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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.