Quote - IMO a big part of the reason poser is headed for an early-ish grave is precisely because it's so cheap. The poser userbase is so spoiled by the artificially low prices in the market, that they simply wont pay for the R&D and tech upgrades that poser requries.

It'll take a bit more than simple R&D, but otherwise your post is pretty spot-on.

IMHO, The PC market at large is what will likely imperil it. Vista, then next-up Windows 7 (due out 2009/2010) is going to introduce a lot of incompatibility in most of the pre-existing software written for it. OSX is slowly but surely getting rid of Carbon (like they kept threatening to do years ago), which will require a whole lot of adaptation on that side as well.

D|S doesn't escape this spectre either, though it has a bit more flexibility to adapt due to a newer (and smaller, more modular) codebase.

Quote - As for D|S, i would point out that D|S loses to Poser in quantity, not quality. [...]
Yes it costs more, but for it's pricing is quite justified in most cases. It does no good to save money on a cheap ass app, only to be saddled with crappy tools from the last decade that waste your time and require excessive workarounds for the simplest things.

The fact that you only pay for what you need is sufficient enough as an argument IMHO. OTOH, D|S could use some standard features (e.g. IBL/AOL) as standard (not plugins) that would also be std. features on nearly every other render engine out there.

Personally, I need to sit down with the hardware I've got before deciding on software apps and what to do with each. It's getting time to bump things up a bit, and deciding how to approach this whole thing. I do more work on laptops now than desktops, but just running out and buying a MacBookPro is kinda out of the question.

/P