Wow, Pengy, rant and run, huh?

As far as your /rant goes, some of what you listed I do, some I don't. I've tried modeling. I suck at it. My texturing capability is just as bad.

Conversely I rarely use pre-made poses, preferring to start from scratch. Pre-made poses rarely get the effect I'm looking for, especially the romantic poses I'm so fond of. Ditto lighting. Sorry, I don't have a digital camera nor do I own a scanner, so I don't create my own backgrounds.

I'm fiendish about using twisting and turning facial expressions and dials. Pre-mades don't cut it for me, especially with male figures. A lot of what I do have in the female characters are left over from all the beta-testing I used to do a couple of years ago, so I use 'em.

I've been around since "the good old days" and honestly they weren't what you're cracking them up to be. Aside from Poser 5 (which yes, I did use) the leaps forward have been nothing short of astounding. Even with Poser 5 we had several advances that, depending on the user viewpoint, outweighed the bugs.

Also, bear in mind, that even if someone uses everything pre-fab and clicks on render, that doesn't mean it'll come out worth looking at. The same goes for all the hard work you described.

One more thing to think about as well, while we're on the subject. I'll use myself as an example. I'm a mother of two sons, both just recently becoming adults. I work a standard forty-hour week, go to school part-time to get my Bachelors (MIS), am partially disabled, author romantic fiction, and do all the things real people do. I do NOT have the time to work everything from scratch. It takes hours to create a good render anyway (have one on my hard drive I've been at for two months now, in my spare time). I'm not about to figure in texture creating, modeling, and most of the other things you suggested.

There's my annual rant.

Linda

Brynna

"Occam's Razor: The simplest explanation is almost always that somebody screwed up." - House

   

Dell Desktop XPS 8940 i9,  two 14 tb External drives, 64 GB DDR4 RAM, NVidia RTX 3060 12 GB DDR5.

Monitor - My 50 inch Hitachi TV. Works great!

Daz Studio - whatever the latest version is. Haven't decided if I'm upgrading to Poser 13 or not.

Photoshop.

I'm creating a Steampunk Tarot Deck. There's an older version in my Gallery, then a newer version.