I very much like the zoom/pan controls in 3DS Max: panning by dragging the viewport with the middle mouse button pressed, zooming about the mouse cursor using the scroll wheel. Intuitive and fast.
Zoom functions that can be extremely useful: zoom to selection, zoom entire scene, zoom in/out (the latter should be a "mode", in which you can use left mouse+move up/down and the arrow keys to zoom).
The Vue method of dragging around the orthographic views for panning, combined with rotating the camera around the selection center (or scene center when nothing is selected) by dragging is also intuitive and very useful IMO.

And OGRE for scene preview - it would be wonderful. The amount of defail should be configurable by the user - low detail for quickly moving around even in more complex scenes, high detail for OpenGL quality rendering, especially useful for rendering animations.

OGRE supports an extensive array of mapping: normal mapping, parallax mapping, specular mapping, light mapping, you name it. More than Poser, much more than D|S. This mapping functionality is extremely useful for semi-realistic realtime 3D graphics, and will be a great asset to animators.
But most of the current Poser/ DS content doesn't come with all these maps, relying on detailed geometry instead. FAST could benefit from algorithms that derive these maps from the geometry, the same way that it is possible to generate a displacement map from a highly detailed ZBrush model.

The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter

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