I'm jumping in here late. Sorry.

Like many Poser users I went through the same torment as you did.

Up until recently my solution was to use Poser 4 pro pack and Max 3.1. The free plug-in worked wonderful despite the poser community almost unanimously denouncing it. But of course I was giving up many other features with this solution. The other Poser to Max solutions look interesting but I don’t like the idea of depending on a small company to be there for me on a big project.

A few months ago I switched to Max 8 Biped. I'm an experienced Max user but biped / skinning and the whole character creation thing was new to me. The learning curve was steep but I can now rig, pose, morph and animate as well as I was doing in Poser. Biped is very Poser like and has some really cool features.

I don’t use Aiko or Victoria so this of course made the choice easier (rigging them in Max would be too difficult I would think).

 Just my thoughts.