Maya is no more difficult to learn than any other mid-priced / high-end app, especially if you have a good grasp on the Poser 5+ material room. It does offer far more (animation) control, modelling (yes it imports .obj, as in Wavefront from which Maya descended and Collada in version 2008). True MEL is a language bbut theoretically not much diffferent from Python if you need that level of control. Its rendering strengths are (not limited to) mental ray and its awesome SSS shader, a flexible but straight forward material construction area and its ability to mimic real world lights - and in the case of mental ray - import light profiles from light manufacturers. If you decided to go this route make sure to resize your textures down to a reasonable level, remove the 31 redundant duplicate copies of Poser-genrated materials, and consider using lighter meshes. It's not that Maya can't handle all those things, it's just that Maya has very efficient ways interpolate detail which Poser needs to have explicitly created for it.