I've never been on a "quest" for photoreal renders.. look at my gallery.. it's mostly toon stuff.

That said, Having AO added was a godsend for any render type. Not glowing nostrils, "crease" shados without a bazillion lights just good advancements.

I also rarely ray trace as well but when I need it, I NEED it, bottom line.

And anyone saying using th ematerial room only has "limited" use is waering big honkin horse blinds. Check any of Ajax's shader, or any of the mathmatica shaders baggins bill has been creating, and your eyes will open BIG time!

Why the cheering for the downfall of P4? Simple. A lot of additional work has had to be done for every single product in the store to support it still. it add a lot of additional testing to get a product "store ready", and there's already a HUGE number of things to suport and double check to create something for the masses.

And so many people clung to P4's apron strings, that very few people even bothered to explore the powerful new tools we were handed in P5. Without that P4 crutch, people are forced to finally make the leap to at least P5. The more people using it, the more people will discover new and better uses of the tools made available to us.

Plus all that time that used to be used testing and supporting P4 will go into product improvement for existing versions.

From a creator's standpoint, one of the biggest issues facing content creators, is the time involved to create something, and the bottom line in making money doing it. Poser content is VERY undervalued for the work time involved, and w've lost MANY outstanding artists because of this.Plus many artists who MIGHT have created the new outstanding advancement just didn't out the time into it, knowing they wouldn't be able to even make minimum wage doing it.

You think Anton, or Neftis would have left if there was a bigger financial "carrot" giving them incentive to stay?

How many tutorials utilities and posts are there about runtime management,  when EF gave us multiple runtimes, an dexcellent management tool, if used properly? And it took like a year or two for everyone to catch on useing it. (Heck some people are STILL discovering it!)

Most other 3d communities embace new tech advanacements, and exploit them as much as possible. Many in the Poserverse however still remains mired in old tech, and refuse to learn some very simple tools that makes thier poser use life easier, faster, and yeilds better results.

That HAS been shifting though, since P6's release, and even moreso since EF made P5 available for free.

That means more new users will also be drawn to the fold, more people will push the tools we have as much as possible, and we'll ALL benefit from these advancements.

Look at tools that would have never been created if we didn't have advancements:

Wardrobe Wizard
Poser Toolbox
Puppetmaster
Shader Spider
Particles 1,2,3
PoserPhsyics
Matmatica
objtocr2

Each brings more powerful tools and in some cases amazingly easy tools to the Poserverse, and we're all lucky the artists have stuck arond to create them.

Netherworks is a good example of one of those artists who tries to push the tools we have as hard as possible to yield new and creative results. Support the guys doing the legwork to make our poser life richer, rather then holding them back supporting 8 years old technology.

Way too many people take way too many things way too seriously.