Quote - I don't think it's an issue of Poser, any upgrades, or its content suddenly becoming unmarketable.  It's more the point of whether the program will be surpassed in ease of use, innovation, development, and content by another program - and at this point that's more likely.

Things to look out for in the future with the various programs include compatibility with subdivision, conforming/adjusting/transferring morphs/scaling (ADS/morphoforms) from figures to clothing/props, optitex (which D|S is working on), node-based shaders (which poser has - Carrara and D|S do not), body-weighting, etc.

I agree, and with the advancements recently in many open source packages I think it's only a matter of time before somebody out there gets fed up enough with Poser to code there own package.  Truth be told I'm leaning that direction myself.

Don't get me wrong, I like Poser and I think its a great program overall, but there are a lot of features I'd like to see changed or added and it just doesn't look like the development for Poser is headed in that direction at all.  In point of fact I believe that the develoment of Poser will probably come to a halt relatively soon, once Smith Micro begins to realize that the Pro market just isn't falling all over themselves to pay that kind of coin for what is still a hobbiest application.

So unless another company purchases Poser from Smith Micro, I think we'll probably see at best one or two additional "upgrades", both minor, and both more designed more to integrate Poser with other higher end apps as opposed to truly updating Poser's own capabilities particularly in the rendering arena.  The other alternative I see possibly happening is that Smith Micro purchases a higher end app like Vue, Carrara, Bryce or something in that range and tries to integrate Poser with it, selling the two apps as a package and given their recent nonsensical price increase probably jacking the prices of the "integrated" package to something in the $1000 range.

I know a lot of people consider this "sky is falling" rhetoric, but the plain and simple truth is Poser simply cannot compete in the $500 per license market, it just doesn't have the horsepower.  So either SM wakes up (unlikely), or more than likely they simply abandon Poser and consider it a tax write off.

If and when they do get around to selling it to another developer, the next developer is really going to be up against a wall from the get go, working with code that is for the most part fairly outdated by most of the competition and competing with what are likely to be other alternatives like DS that will have advanced in technology while Poser has remained more or less stagnant.

Either way I doubt it will be long now before somebody, perhaps myself, perhaps someone else, comes up with an open source alternative that will read and manipulate Poser content and give at least some of the features you mentioned above with an interface that isn't quite as hostile as Blender is now.

-Never fear, RenderDog is near!  Oh wait, is that a chew toy?  Yup. ok, nevermind.. go back to fearing...