Quote - 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?

Offhand? I can only think of a few (.rsr and .bum, mostly). I can see other oddball items going by the wayside as well, but things like .cr2 and .pz3 are ASCII, and can pretty much be read-in and beaten-up any way you want without having to worry (too much) about compatibility retention.

Quote - 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.

Certainly - it's one of the best future-proofing methods around still. Collada is another (it can hold more info, and since it's industry-wide, it isn't likely to die anytime soon).

Quote - What would my dream be? Poser on a Linux box...

Ditto. If I had to take a healthy dump into Dan Farr's coffee mug in order to get Poser running native in Linux, I'd happily do it. Same with getting D|S onto Linux... Stewer's taste buds would be in mortal danger if the PTB decided that I had to poop in his coffee mug to get D|S going natively in Linux.

/P