Quote - i dare say that the majority of poser users does never touch the joint editor, let alone the setup room.

the problem is that many do, yet ultimately cant do much with it. sure, something like apollo or even what daz has done with the mil3 figures (and no doubt mil4) is great... but its still crap compared to a properly rigged figure using industry standard tools. all of the bending capabilities that we have in our models now are nothing but hacks that poser community veterans have discovered as workarounds to the shortcomings of the poser rigging.

the work that daz, anton, jimb, etc have done on their figures to help them bend better is nothing short of heroic, but the fact remains is that they are working with a prehistoric rigging system. just how many more toys and box bullet points are people going to scream for until they realise that right now the biggest shortcoming of poser is its joint system - which is supposed to be the core of the entire damned program.

do people not realise that movement and pose are the most important factors in realism or believability? you can take a completely unrealistic anime character, rig it properly and animate it with good motion capture, and even though it has completely unrealistic proportions and is rendered with a cartoony cel shader, your mind will accept it as a 'real' character after watching for a few minutes because of its fluid lifelike movements, poise, and behavior.
yet take the most high-res, photorealistic character rendered with subsurface scattering, AO, GI, etc etc and rig it with crappy joints, apply the same motion capture, and the first time that character moves the spell will be broken and it will be discarded by the brain as awkward artificial rubbish. the fact that the above is even painfully evident in gallery 3D still renders is absolutely unbelievable.

even daz is missing the point. they are releasing V4, which will no doubt be an even further subdivided V3 with even more body parts, morphs, JCMs and CR2 hacks to get her to look better.. while in fact what they should be doing is ditching the archaic ascii-based CR2 format in daz studio and reworking it to support a more industry standard weight-mapping joint system. so now we have 2 companies creating products and unfortunately listening far too much to the general poser userbase who is more captivated by bullet points on a software box and fancy new catch-words like subsurface scattering to realise that the core of the program they are using has been obsolete for 2 versions and counting.