Quote -
Lol.. actually I'm a lot more comfortable with GTK than I am with QT, in fact so far QT is presenting a host of issues that may well cause me to reconsider using it.  While I've worked with the professional commercial version, the open source version seems pretty limited by comparison.  So this might just become a GTK app from the ground up.

Depends on where you d/load it... I don't much bother with Qt Designer except for mock-ups (mostly to check spatials and arrangements). Otherwise, I use my own bitmaps and color schemes, and edit the bastich in a real IDE (Used to be a SlickEdit addict, now I just stick with Eclipse.)

Quote - As to it's own file format, there are some things i'd like to be able to do that I'm not certain any other file format would take into account.

True enough. It also limits your featureset to what the format spec can provide.

Quote - Take a skirt, for example.  one set of bones could be used to conform it to the figure, an entirely seperate set of bones could be used to move, bend and twist the mesh in various ways to fit the skirt properly for various poses.

I love the idea of having two sets of 'bones'... I'd been toying with the idea offhand for awhile now (that is, one set of invisible joint-matching bones and 'skeletal' mesh to conform an item to the figure, and a second set of visible bones in a parallel hierarchical tree/branch set to allow for clothing movements). This allows for more accurate clothing movements (e.g. a jacket that actually drapes backwards at the bottom when a figure sits down, long skirts that can actually drape outwards away from a figure's sitting butt and legs, etc.)

Material zones are a different critter altogether. in D|S they are (IIRC, have to check) treated separately.

Quote - I'm still reading through the collada format, if I can accomodate everything i'd like to do in collada I'd love to make that the native file format, but as it is I'm not certain that will be the case, so jury is still out there.

It's possible, but that depends on the features you want to include. OTOH, you could possibly extend it as well, then have one export save to the std. COLLADA format for everyone else, and your own extended version for in-app goodies. Whether other apps decide to use those extensions or not is up to them... who knows, maybe COLLADA will decide to add the extensions? :)

Quote - As to Daz Studio, it does have some nice capabilites, don't get me wrong, but it's not a Linux App and in order to get a lot of the functionality I'd like to have I'm stuck buying mondo plugins for it.  That's all well and good, I have nothing against throwing a few bucks towards the coders for there work.

No worries - that's how it's built. The codebase can (at least since OSX/Intel) be hammered into working natively with Linux, but that'll take some convincing of the PTB there. The biggest job there would be converting the libraries (preferably to static 2.6 kernel-friendly libs to make it more or less universal). But... since that doesn't seem like it's gonna happen anytime soon, hey - go for it. I'd be happy to help when and where I can.

Quote -
So after really considering all the options I thought an open source replacement was the way to go, and there are so many possibilities out there for additional features it's not even funny. 

Indeed - and I for one would love to see it happen. :)

/P