Poser 6 wins the feature war hands down. Poser is the best overall price/performance answer for more advanced users, but.. Most people don't animate. Most people don't do figure creation. Many (probably most) people aren't going to delve extensively into Poser's shader creation. A lot of people still seem to be intimidated by the hair and cloth rooms. I'll bet that many people don't even use magnets. In short, Studio already offers what a large number of people really need/want it this type of application. If they decide later they want more, the plug-in route is appealing because you buy only what you need, when you want, even if it ends up costing a little more. Heaven forbid, the DS plug-ins may even offer superior functionality or ease of use over their Poser equivalents. I think 3DeLight can probably hold it's own against FireFly and it should give you access to a whole raft of Renderman resources. Currently DS doesn't give you the ability to really harness it's power so we'll have to see what the rendering plug-in(s) look like and how much they cost. I think again a lot of the does it have AO, IBL, etc. misses the point that there is whole big group of people out there who aren't going to learn to use those features anyway. Whether DS will be successful I don't know but I think they've calibrated the application pretty well to the sweet spot of the potential user population. You may denigrate the "make art" crowd, but that's where the big money, if any, will be found.

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