Quote - ironically, when looking into the "Pro" applications such as Max, Maya, Cinema, Lightwave....

that world is accustomed to and leveraged for much lower poly mesh than Poser and Daz!

Why? Well, they grew up over time when computers were not as powerful, and in a professional production setting laggy viewport and render were intolerable. Hence, low poly.

Also, the destination of much of this is to games, where the characters have to react in real time. You can't have high-poly.

So, for anything seeming to call fo hi-res figures, the policy was to subdivide at the last minute. You deploy the low res version (for example the 4K V4 mentioned above) in the viewport, and then just before render you "subdivide". So, IK vickie becomes 4k Vickie becomes 17K vickie becomes 68K vicky.
 
The poser/daz world has a different focus. HiRes from the start so users don't have to manipulate.

Recently all the pro apps have improved viewport performance and of course computers keep getting more powerful. This consideration is lessening. But not going away!

::::: Opera :::::

One other reason is rigging.  It's much easier and faster to paint weight maps on a figure of say 10k polys than it is one of 80k polys or whatever Poser figures are.  You can set up much more complex animation controllers far easier, and get better bending, etc. if you don't have to deal with tens of thousands of vertices in critical areas (like shoulders and hips).  Realistic details can be added to the subdivided mesh through displacement or normals mapping.  Plus, this allows for much faster communication with whatever renderer you are using, so scenes will arguably render faster too.  Zbrush and Mudbox (combined with high end renderers like MentalRay) have allowed studios to take this to a whole other level now.