"There certainly is a niche for a Poser-specific modeller: one that works in the native scale; handles groups and materials "correctly" (or as Poser expects them, anyway); doesn't mess up vertex order, and so on. "

Any of the good commercial modelers do all these quite well.. Lightwave's, Max's, Modo, ect.

The problems arise when you start looking at the lower cost modelers out there.

When it comes to this type of application, in many cases you get exactly what you pay for.

That's why Lightwave's modeler has been worth it's weight in gold to me many times over.

Thing is, it takes developement dollars to fix features and add new features really needed for quality developement, and because of the low cost, all the low end (or free) modeling solutions out there have one issue or another.

Either you have a clunky impossible to figure out interface, or you have point order, uv mapping or other issues.

I haven't heard anything really bad about silo2 however, and it seems pretty capable for a fairly lost cost.

Way too many people take way too many things way too seriously.