I agree with you 100% Stahlratte. I can understand the longing by some to make Poser more Maya-like and I think CL tried to address some of those desires with the shaders, hair, cloth etc. in newer versions. I also think that conforming clothing, transmapped hair and bitmapped textures represent something of a sweetspot in terms of what many people are comfortable with and support at the moment. Sure that will change gradually but what are the user priorities for most people? Which do they want more, hair blowing in the wind or do they want simple fast, good looking hair? Sure, you can do great things with shaders and nodes and such but most people know how to modify a texture in an image editor while not a fraction of them know how to manipulate nodes to get the effect they want. And what of rigging? I guess I'm blind but I swear, I look at some of these pictures people show as examples of how horrible and inhuman the current figures look and I just can't really see it. I suspect I'm not alone though. I doubt Poser is going to somehow be overtaken by lowpoly game systems and it's only real competition, after all the years is the nascent DS. It EF wants to make a poor man's Maya, then they should incorporate those features into Shade. If they're not careful, DS will inherit the majority of the Poser user base who aren't concerned about esoteric rigging technologies. Ironically, with it's modular architecture, DS could incorporate the higher end features as well, much more smoothly than Poser.

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