I don't think that Poser is a toy, but the initial design was very unique for the time.  Things like 'conforming clothes', joint parameters, tri-axial weights, body-centric cameras, sphere-based lights were uncommon but the approach that stuck for doing human figure work in this regard.

The biggest problem I find is that the original design was basically ad-hoc.  Very few references and papers from the time period (say from v1 to v4) mention any of these type of features or they do them in a completely different way.  This is what makes Poser figures, lights, cameras so hard to bring into other 3D applications.  Other 3D applications, although using different solutions, at least used the ones that had been developed and researched in the background of the field (and can be used by developers).  Poser broke all molds by doing almost everything internally and with little recognition of standard 3D practices - in order to have actual information on how Poser works, you either need to be employed by the company (with an NDA most likely) or get your hands on the SDK (from what I've seen, except for the Curious Labs plugins, it doesn't give developers the type of indepth knowledge to make Poser content work identically in other 3D apps).

The worst of this is that Poser has not moved forward (on its own anyway - mainly by incorporation rather than evolution).  These same now-archaic systems are still in place.  This is where Poser has its own problem - the system is so nonstandard that not even the developers can find a way to evolve it with developments that have moved the industry forward by leaps and bounds in the past ten years.  And thus the reason that it still can't handle multi-figure scenes, multiple undos, and so on.

As I said many times, a NURBS base geometry (or base polygon geometry with a NURBS cage) would help solve some of this.  But it would require reworking morphs and other facets of their internal figure algorithms.   And yet they would not need to sacrifice all of the existing content in the process - maintain support for the previous content while introducing the new.

We'll see.

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, you blow your whole leg off.

 -- Bjarne Stroustrup

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