Just for the sake of argument... what changes in Poser would make legacy stuff incompatible?

Isn't poser content kind of straight forward? What would become obsolete? The rigging? I imagine injecting new rigging information wouldn't be too difficult is some new standard is introduced. Shaders?

Would it not be possible to at least convert .pz3 with the proper runtime assets available into a basic textured .obj to be rendered by some different app. That is how I store my projects, as .pz3. I suppose you could even repose a .obj made from a .pz3 using grouping. The problem is texturing when different mesh share materials with the same name. I have tried to save out scenes as .obj and encountered this problem... to bad there is no automated way to rename material zones so you could for instance save a multi-figure construction as a single .obj file.

I have found I can save posed figures as a .obj and re-import it and turn it into a figure so I can still apply MATposes to it and restore transparency settings.

The reason we can't just run the old software is that it becomes difficult/impossible to find a platform. I have Painter 8 but I never use it. I like Painter 5 but to run it on a modern computer I have to use a very mysterious memory allocation patch. I have applications like Delta Toa's Monet and the original FutureWave Smart Sketch on floppy but I can't obtain a Mac with a floppy drive to run them on... really I would trade Poser and Painter and Photoshop just to have those two old apps back but my classic machine passed away and I can't find a replacement.

What would my dream be? Poser on a Linux box... I really did not want to have to buy a Windows machine but it seemed senseless to buy a Linux machine if I was going to have to run Windows on it to use Poser.

My problem is with idea that new stuff actually works better than old stuff. I still can't figure out how a huge Windows OS benefits me as a consumer... it has no obvious functional advantages over the old WinDOS GUI I used to use on my IBM XT that I can tell but it requires an expensive platform and is unstable.

I can't find any graphics app able to give me the functionality that Delta Toa's Monet did weighing in at 420KB. Some features of my $30 SmartSketch were integrated into Flash but at a price I can not afford and with an implementation that is far inferior. Every one talks about Moore's law but never about Parkinson's Law as it applies to computing... bloat usually overtakes functionality. Poser 7 is a rare instance of an apps late versions actually having usefull new functionalities.