stephaniebt - that's right, it's not.  and that's my concern.  in the thread at daz i said, "this is like saying if you take people's calculators away, they'll do the right thing and balance it by hand.  even though most weren't balancing them at all before."  i do have some textures with no brows, and i find i use them more often.  and i have participated in multiple threads asking for more textures with transmapped brows and for p6 layer style make-up and body hair.  but it is so little of a practice and so few consumers actually do more than "oh my god!  you're previews are beautiful!  let me buy that now!" that few merchants pay attention. 

i know that removing the area to transmap will only make things worse. 

as a for instance, i have 8 different free eyebrow transmaps from different people for v3.  they don't need to be huge, because the eyebrows weren't a random region on a whole facial map.  they weren't hard to make, because the creators just needed to follow the brow geometry's map.  not map something in the area that uv maps become complex- the eye region of the head.  not long ago i tried to make, for a pic of my own, a sort of white mask with the eyes lined in black for a unimesh figure.  i found it nearly impossible to make the long line out from the eye i wanted to, because of how condensed the map got at that place.  decided to look around at who else had solved this problem only to quickly find that most had just avoided it by not putting any hard edged decoration in this area. 

working on an unmarked and tiny piece of a uvmap seems substantially more difficult than working within a specifically defined area.

minor correction: aery soul hasn't sold any textures yet.  they have one free texture: luna.  they want their work to be perfect before going to sale.  i can voice these concerns in their forum, but i guarantee that a) they'll do what they think is best (they're very polite but adamant about their decisions regarding their products) and b) tons will buy their upcoming alice regradless.

coldrake - every day i see redheads with bright  "red-gold" eyebrows, and true blonds with blond eyebrows.  no, they don't show up well.  and that's why they look both beautiful and interesting and memorable unlike the wealth of bottle blondes with dark eyebrows, like the two beryld mentioned.  this is not to say there aren't blondes with dark eyebrows, because there are. but about 90% of blondes i see without the telltale roots or deliberate salon streaking or the other obvious dye job cues have not only blond brows but blond lashes.  i can't think of one natural red-head i've seen that didn't have red eyebrows.  i'm sure they exist, but i haven't noticed any.  and my absolute pet peeve, textures where people should have jet black brows having brown ones that are ridiculously reddish is quite common.

gareee-  i thank you for your inspirational words.  they make me feel better about being critical when purchasing (often i feel vaguely guilty when not buying things from merchants i really respect as individuals).  would you suggest providing feedback as well?  because i know lots of times i wonder whether i should say anything to someone who makes a product i almost want to buy, but has a decision making flaw.   i don't want to make them feel bad about their work, but i also feel that if i don't say anything, they probably won't address the issue i see.  what's you're advice?

the thing is, daz has a return policy, but not everyone does.  and the whole reason i prefer separate brows is because i find no difference in the result but more versatility in use. 

in the end, i see this as a case where customers and merchants should do lots more work so that daz could save work on morph creation that was craft that went into v3 and v1/v2.  and that daz responded by saying, "well, do this instead.  this is the best practice."  and followed it up by not doing it themselves.   i don't think this is horrible or egregious behavior, but i don't agree that it's perfectly o.k. and that they have no responsibility for what i see as a significant decrease in quality.  v4 has other areas where she shows an increase in quality, but this is definitely a backward step.

as for postworking textures... if i have to at minimum triple compress a texture (once for original jpeg source photo, second for v4 texture, and third for postworking the texture), well, that's a much less than ideal situation.  and painting my own brows when there isn't a specifically dedicated region and a more complicated mapping.... it's probably beyond me to do it to my own satisfaction.  though it seems like i'll have to try.  which is good, i suppose, but makes me less willing to pay even low prices for textures.

stephaniebt: are the seams as much of a nightmare as i've heard?  i've seen some texture artists express dismay over the high increase in seams, and i'm wondering how problematic you found that compared to working on unimesh textures?