poser 7 is coming out soon. there is a poser 6, and poser 5. poser 4 is nearly 4 generations outdated (counting PP). no other community in the world has such rediculously unrealistic compatibility expectations.

it requires vastly different packaging and  product considerations to support poser 4, propack, and the poser 5/6 families. these are three distinctly different groups with 3 different packaging requirements. now merchants are automatically expected to support daz|studio as well, and dont forget the mac platform.
poser 4 is obsolete software. with e-frontier giving away poser 5 for free last week, people now have no excuse to use poser 4 or propack any longer. 'more user friendly' is nonsense, the core application has not changed in poser 5 or 6. sure some of the 'rooms' are more complex, but you do not have to use them. aside from a few extra buttons in your interface there is nothing daunting about P5. once you become familiar with it, every single change only gives you the opportunity to vastly improve your renders and characters.

how much longer do people expect merchants to keep supporting poser 4? when P7 comes out? P8? PX? its absolutely rediculous. perhaps people dont understand how much time poser packaging, testing and compatibility takes... it currently makes up at least 1/3 of my workflow.

i think that if people insist on still using poser 4, then it should be their responsibility to learn  how to convert poser 5/6 products by now. i will not be doing it any longer, ive had enough.

there is so much potential in poser products using the new dynamic cloth, sub-poly displacement mapping, complex shader nodes, etc and it has all been bloody wasted for the last several years because people refuse to let go of poser 4. 90% of the content in the marketplace is currently 'dumbed down' to a poser 4 level, when it could actually be twice the product if it inccorporated some of the newer technologies.... yet merchants, especially newer ones, are afraid to leave out P4 support because they think they will lose sales if they stop supporting it.

the free giveaway of poser 5 last week did it for me - it was the last nail in the P4 cofffin, the last little push i needed. i would rather lose a handful of P4 sales than water down my products any longer: all of my future products make heavy use of P5/6 shaders, displacement  mapping, dynamic cloth, etc.

let poser 4 go. it is obsolete. people expecting merchants, or even just asking merchants, to devote countless hours to catering to obsolete software and releasing products that are nowhere near realizing their true potential because they themselves do not want to invest the time to learn the current version of the software is extremely unfair, and only in the poser community could such an outlandish notion even be considered.

sorry if this post sounded harsh but this is a very sore point for me, and its been building up for several years now. not because of the time and effort invested by merchants over the years supporting obsolete software, but because there are so many excellent new features in P5/6 that have been vastly underused for the sake of P4 compatibility. the average marketplace product, and consequently the average gallery render, would be far superior today if people just accepted the fact tthat P4 is dead.