Ah, talk about waiting for your number to come up... "...same people have always worked on Poser. Always the same team..." Which perhaps at this point is not necessarily a right good thing, especially if they're going to start with a clean slate as everyone agrees needs to be done. It really depends on whether the existing folks, given the mandate and the resources, could really create something with "radical new features" like OS standard UI integration. I'm not sure avoiding the DS approach just because Daz was there first makes a lot of sense but who knows what evil lurks in the heart of Japanese business men? The component/plug-in route certainly hasn't hurt Max and others. Having three or four "editions" is still better than one size fits all though. Access 97 was about as stable as one could wish for DB (within its limits) in my experience. Access 2K seemed good as well but that was about the time I switched to mainly developing for SQL Server so I can't say as much on that version.

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