ThrommArcadia - thanks!  yeah, i think her initial morphs are fairly limited.  i've been expecting them to release the old packages piecemeal: ethnic, phoneme, fantasy, etc., but they're taking longer than i expected to do it.  if they wait much longer, there will start to be noise that she always looks the same.

patorak - actually, i very much doubt daz is thumbing their nose.  i don't think they exactly did it on purpose.  i think a3 had lots of advances, and quickly became more popular than v3.  i remember reading a post on their forums that said the reason so much more stuff was being released for a3 than v3 was the a3 stuff just sold better.   and people had been saying v3 was just too amazonian for ages.  so i think it was an obvious direction to go in.  i wouldn't be surprised if there was proof that v4 was made out of aiko's mesh, just like dodger found proof in v3's mesh that she was made from v2.    so i think they made her deliberately more petite and more like aiko, but i don't think they deliberately created a figure that can easily look underage.

daz has much stricter t.o.s. on their forums and galleries than anywhere else i know of. 

the main advice i can give you on avoiding the hip problem is to look at a lot of reference photos and think about what's under the skin.  the way this other artist referred to it was a proper pelvic cradle.  i think if you have a notion of how a woman's skeleton works at the hip, and how the muscle works to support that, you'll be going in the right direction.  imho, also look at a lot of photos with legs at a 90 degree angle or so from the body.  i always liked a3's shoulders and more petite proportions, but her legs always looked glued to the front of her body when bent.  v4 has less of a problem with that an a3 but more than v3.

i think a lot of models come at figures from aesthetics instead of how a body has to be shaped to work properly.  the perspective is impression down instead of anatomy up.  i notice a lot of people model like people tend to draw.  they make what they think is there and what they want to see (and not what they don't want to see) instead of what is there.   oh, and if you can, use amateur photos or photos specifically for reference.  a lot of professional work will be postworked to make things look like people expect, and magazines especially do that.  as someone mentioned to me recently, they make sure that even photos of tools have been postworked to have the right highlights and gleams.