The problem I see is that most people believe that a hobbyist program could and SHOULD deliver better results than what the professionals can.

"It is not uncommon in production to have 3 or 4 rigs for the same character to be applied in different circumstances."

So, why dont we use several rigs for several ranges of motion ?
Want V3 to sit without her ass exploding ?
Change the buttock JPs with a JP-pose and inject corrective morphs.
Want her to raise her arms above the head ?
Do the same with her shoulders.

You can inject morphs and change joint parameters as easy as you can click on a normal pose, so why does nobody USE this feature ?

Adding new bodyparts is not the solution, because it ruins intuitive hand posing and animating.
Look at DAZ and EF and you see that V3 has only one neck (V2 has two), and Jessi has no buttocks. (Judy has them).
They both gave additional bodyparts a try and both changed direction later.

While I DO like JCMs, they should be combined with new joints and IMO injecting them only for more extreme poses would be better than having them permanently in the cr2, even for poses when they are not needed.

Biggest part of Posers success is that it is SIMPLE, so even the unwashed masses can understand (and afford) it.
Noone wants bad posing characters, but noone wants characters that get so complicated that they cost twice as much to rig or twice as much to cloth.
And the more time a merchant has to spend creating something, the more money he needs per item to brake even.

Most people who use Poser are not "just too poor to afford MAYA or MAX", they also just dont WANT to spend as much time as a professional artist learning to pose or to create clothes or sorting out a myriad of nodes.
(Thats why Poser6 also brought back a P4 material room, and DS doesnt even bother with them)

And its these folks who BUY stuff and keep the Poserverse running by paying DAZ and EFs bills.

If you try to twist their arms because youre on a crusade for the "Holy Rig", they just wont buy.
The cloth room, the face room, the hair room, the set-up room are all big fat failures.
(Dont get me wrong, I DO like dynamic clothing and even created my own, and Im happy that the other rooms are there, too )

But the majority just DOES NOT USE them, so if I were to sell clothes, Id sure make them conforming, and if Id create hair, Id sure make it transmapped, not strand based.

Poser is a tool to create pretty pictures, sometimes even art, and the easier this tool is to use, the more people will be able to use it.
Again, im all for improved posing, but just remember that not everything that looks good on paper will also be a success in your runtime.

"These days, you have to be pretty technical
before you can even aspire to crudeness."

^-^

stahlratte