An interesting and informative discussion.  Came in here looking for exactly this...

I'm on Poser 5.  Frustrated.  Thinking about upgrading to P7 and then started wondering why I wasn't considering DS.  And of course had a ton of questions about what it can and can't do.

So it sounds like it has a reasonably advanced texturing system.  You can do some kind of sub-surface skin type shading.

It poses and animates...  I assume you can render out animations?  Not that rendering animations even falls within what I'm interested in.

It exports so I can continue to use other apps in my workflow.

I might have to give this a try.