I have a bunch of their stuff, it all was very expensive, but for me I considered it well worth it.  But from a pure customer point of view their products have some issues:

 

1.  They aren't designed to be Poser user friendly.  They don't have morphs that you might want to adjust figures to look different.  They lack animation controls(especially face morphs)  you would want if you were using it for any real animation.  All those dozens of little features that most Poser merchants consider standard about figures and how to support (so to maximize other artists ability to use the product) are mostly lacking on SA products.  Features are almost always about polygons and not rigging/controls.

 

2. They are extremely high polygon and high texture models and Poser really doesn't handle them well.  I still remember trying to get my 2 gig workstation to render a short animation of a couple of figures about to fight in the middle of the big SA RDL7 stage (which is no longer available).  I was using the standard textures (they also sold a high-res pack that I skipped).  In the end in order to render the animation I had to down-sample all of the textures by 4 to make a set that Poser 4 pro could work with.  And oddly enough you really couldn't tell I did it, way over kill.

 

3. They aren't cheap and since leaving Daz they have only gotten worse, at least Daz had specials and sales that would include them from time to time.

 

4. On forums their public "representative" is not very pleasant.  They don't appear to care if you have bought their products and are happy to remind you that you really aren't important to them.

 

5. They seem to attack artists that have used their products if they can't seem to find a record of you buying them.  This is actually new, since they have no records of who bought their stuff at Daz (Daz doesn't give out that info), but starting with the Grim armor they do know who bought it and have used that info to justify attacking artists.  The whole mess on PoserPros is the most public example, but I have no doubt their have been others.  Of course make no mistake, every kid using stolen Poser models has their stuff, I certainly can see how that would get on their nerves.  I doubt their sales are all that high really, mainly because they are way over priced for the market.  And there is no market for the high end package versions they are selling.

 

In the end it kind of boils down to what are you looking for?  If you need a merchant that cares about their products and customers and is trying to make good stuff for good people, SA may not be the company for you.  On the other hand if your looking for extremely well modeled sci-fi equipment and characters that happen to fit into SA's failed movie/game project and don't need a lot of hand holding as far as using them, SA products really are top-notch.

 

I wish they would take a look at some other Poser merchants products (like figures from Netherworks) and work a bit on making their models more Poser artist friendly (morphs, controls and riggings).  I wish they would never again post or reply in a public forum and only post announcements and adverting.  I realize they don't care about me, but I don't need them to rub it in my face every time they do talk.  But most of all I wish they would release more stuff, because I do really enjoy their products, despite all their flaws.

I suppose I should also mention that yes, I am using the Grim armor as my current forum avatar so whatever I've said may have a huge bias, though I'm pretty sure I'm not a plant.  Maybe. :-)

-Matt