Quote - And 2 years from now, the average speed of systems in use will be 30-40% faster. That pretty much happens every 2 years.

Sure, but then a new Vicky gets released every 2 years and she uses 50-60% more resources than the old one and pfffft... there goes much of your performance gain from your fancy new hardware.

Quote - Everyone bitches about high poly meshes, but the REAL poser killers are piles and piles of high res textures. take a look at the amount of ram a mesh takes up, and then take a look at how much the textures up.. like 80% of the total!

Absolutely right, but the poly count hits your render times and your dynamics, so it's still an issue.

Quote - With any other 3d software platform, people regularly upgrade whenever they can.. but the poserverse is well known for trying ti run win 95, and using the oldest base mesh possible and trying tio get by without taking advantage of any of the new tech available..

Yep, but then the 'other 3D platform' folks are generally on a different budget altogether, running much more expensive software and buying models from Dosch Designs, textures from Evermotion and Arroway etc, not waiting for a discount voucher so they can finally grab the $12 item they've had on their wishlist forever.

Quote - I've seen very few new content creators trying to kick out the BEST possible content. Everyone things making poser stuff is "easy" and will make them a quick buck, but in fact, doing quality work and implimenting all the possible bells n whistles you can IS hard work.
...
And sometimes ya just gotta add some additional polys to accomodate morphs, or advanced features, or just to improve rendering appearance.

So hate me if I wanna develop the best possible looking content, with the most features I can pile into it. Hate me if I'm forgetting Joe Blow trying to run P7 on an old win 98 system.

Don't get me wrong, I'm advocating EFFICIENT meshes and textures, not low poly for its own sake. By all means add more edges if they have a purpose (to sharpen a crease, to bevel an edge, to make something bend or morph better, to make displacements more efficient etc). But by the same token, take out edges that clearly aren't serving a useful purpose. If it's efficient it can look great in any render and still work on Joe Blow's clunker, but it takes more work to do it efficiently. Easy to model something, whack the subdivide key twice and call it a 'detailed mesh', then plop it in the middle of a 4096x4096 texture and call it 'high res'. That's what I see happening a lot,  Vicky 3 herself was the worst offender.