I think it depends on the level you're working at. If you just want to click on a MAT Pose, the extra zones don't make much difference, and can allow more flexibility in what the MAT pose can do. If you're creating something which might be a MAT pose later. or otherwise working in the Materials Room, then there are ways of making things easier, but more zones does mean more work. (Obvious Hint: Save as a Material.) I think the market is stuck with the Material Zone pattern of the Unimesh figures, and the extra leg zones on Aiko/Hiro have their uses, such as socks. It would be hard to convince me that a figure needed more, but I can see how more could be used. As for what I'll call Control Maps, feeding into displacement or transparency or into a Blend node, they do hit memory, in a way which just using a Material Zone doesn't. If you want to displace a cloth surface, give it an edge, for a whole Material Zone, just use a Simple_Color node. But, while you can be careful about bitmap sizes, I'm afraid that people with only 512M of RAM should think really hard about getting more. Win XP and Poser itself don't really leave enough room for the data on a scene of more than trivial complexity.