Quote - Jessi and James are completely new figures for Poser 6, they were created in Shade, no relationship to older mesh geometry.

That's good to know. The buzz, when P6 was released, mostly said that Jessi/James still weren't up to the quality of V3/M3. They were better than Judy/Don, but not being better than the figures, DAZ now provides for free, didn't make users want to jump on them.

Just because a character is free doesn't mean they don't get supported. Mayadoll had a significant amount of early support when it was released and, combined with Animedoll, still is one of the better supported figures (with a few more products than Koshini). Mayadoll has been somewhat replaced with Aiko3. Sara got buried when The Girl came out and got repackaged as a lesser, modified character that wasn't as good as the original. Merchants probably wouldn't care too much that a figure has a free grass roots effort

Merchants are mostly going to release products that have a good chance for lots of sales (or is something they want to do or something that they think will fill a nice niche). Doing something with a new generation of Vicki and Mike is going to generate more sales than with other new figures because the DAZ characters are, as a given, going to get better support in today's environment.

If E-Frontiers were to incorporate new figures, in a future version of Poser, that are state of the art, look great, and have better joints than the comparable DAZ figures, there's a good chance that those figures may start challenging the DAZ figures. Lyrra dropped a hint, back in 2004, that she was nudging Poserworld to release figures of their own. That hasn't happened, but a figure getting the full support of Poserworld would have a pretty impressive wardrobe selection that would quickly make the figure very versatile for use.

Aiko's rise to the second most supported figure is an indication that the status quo can be challenged, even if Aiko is still a DAZ figure. Of course, a good part of Aiko's numbers are due to compatibility with the other female DAZ figures (but so does Stephanie who has about half the support). For a new figure, Miki has a decent level of support (just behind Jessi) because it's the best looking, most realistic, Japanese Poser figure on the market.

WardrobeWizard hasn't yet equalized the market, but it's not a perfect solution for fitting clothing to another figure and still takes some effort to use. It's the closest thing to a 1-step solution, but it's still not the holy grail of clothing conversion. Maybe a better clothing converter will be the answer.

As a point of comparison, here's the breakout from May 2004:
Victoria - 2248
Michael - 879
Stephanie - 547
Mayadoll - 161
Koshini - 154
Freak - 86
Dina - 23
Laroo - 18
Alexa - 15

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon