luvver_3d -I am indeed talking about the fast skin shader. Like anything 3D it takes time  - most of my time with is spent combining head and body textures onto the same map.

I'm not having problems with the scaling ratio. Again I don't know Max but in Maya I scale the imported Poser character to 20 so its normal sized (cm is default unit). I usually set the scale settings around 35 which works for me. I haven't tried blurry reflections (raytrace environmental reflections?) but reflect environment only adds almost nothing to render time and looks just as good (once it's turned down a bit).

I have not heard of the DT3D skin shader, but 54 levels of control?! I'm there!