I'm a software developer, and I have some experience in marketing upgrades. The best clue is to see if the initial advertising says, "totally re-written" or "re-coded" in it somewhere. When a package is re-written from the ground up, the developers shout it as the primary improvement, and marketing people jump on anything the programmers are excited about. If that key phrase doesn't appear in the advertising, the code base is very likely to be the same one, with new code added in.

Another important thing to note is that users typically perceive all program problems in one category, which they call "bugs". We, the programmers, usually have three categories for those same problems: "Actual bugs", which are features that are not working the way intended when we wrote them, "side effects", which are problems caused by a program change in one place changing the way another part works (very common when you have an old code base), and "design flaws", which are code parts that are working the way they were written, but for the user they don't work well or aren't useful.

Poser 6 has very few "actual bugs", and not many "side effects". Most of the bugs have long since been addressed in service releases. However, it is riddled with "design flaws", IMO. Most of the time when I hear people talk about bugs in Poser, it's that last category that I think of.

My expectation is that many of these types of bugs that exist in Poser 6 will continue to exist in Poser7. I don't expect a significantly enhanced user interface (which I think Poser sorely needs), and I don't expect that they will add a lot of the features that seem to be shortfalls (such as additions to the sketch room).

Why do I expect that? Because once a code base reaches a certain level of complexity, it becomes very difficult to add a feature to anything without causing a side effect, many of which won't show up in organized testing. Programmers do most of their own testing or testing of each other's work, and they know how the program works, and they don't try all of the things that an end user will try, and they don't always think of the combinations of needs of the end user. Programmers just think about their application differently from what the end user does, and it's very hard to coordinate the two. Beta programs help a lot, because beta testers are usually much more relaxed about bugs and often give the software a workout that programmers would never do. Unfortunately, by the time a program goes into beta, there's no time to fix "design flaws", because the company needs some revenue to pay the programmers in the first place. Plus, version upgrades almost never go into beta.

None of this is meant to be an apology for e-Frontier and the way they do business, or the quality (or lack thereof) in Poser. I just wanted to give a look at the way things are in the business of software.

I expect to get the upgrade from Poser 6, unless there just aren't enough new features that I will actually use. I use a lot of graphics software, and they all have some kind of a problem or limitation in them, some more than others. Bottom line is, if I let bugs stop me from using software, I'd go back to painting on cave walls.

I wouldn't expect an apology. Not because they're not nice people, but their lawyers will urge them to never do that, in case someone ever sues them for something. Legal matters take a lot of the niceness out of people when they're doing business. Again, that's the way it is. The people who make the software may be the nicest people in the world, and be truly and deeply sorry for problems that their customers experience, but saying it out loud is scary to them, from a business point of view.

My $0.02, heavily adjusted for inflation.

Captain Jack