ILM also use PRMan as their main renderer (they only added mentalray when they had to do Star Wars episode 1) Which means that till recently they also had no choice but to use depth maps as their was no way to do raytracing fast enough. But since they did add mentalray, PRMan finally got raytracing and hardware got cheap enough, they now use it in a lot of their work.

Anyway i'm not disagreeing with you, if used correctly depth mapped shadows are fast and effective. They are particularly good in animation because they show none of the artifacts that soft raytraced shadows can, like blotchiness or noise etc. But for the majority of poser work, which consists of stills, they aren't that great.

But heck i'd be happy if more poser work used any kind of shadows at all :)