The early Poser figures and the early DAZ figures were easy to use because of the low polycount and they were easy to morph because of low poly count. Yes you need resolution to do morphs but I have noticed that very dense meshes don't morph well. The DAZ bloat is the inflation of resolution for purely marketting concerns, bigger is better. I can't really use most of the new figures I have aside from nude and maybe with hair even though I just bought a new and for me very expensive computer... with DAZ the bloat has extended to crazy .cr2 that have arcain injection systems, complicated JCM morphs and but loads of JCM magnets that make the .cr2 very breakable, unreliable to save, and very hard for amatures to work with. I use a V4 at les then a quarter resolution and with the magnets painfully removed and yet it is essential indistiguishable in renders from the huge default figure. EF created figure with enough mesh in the eyeballs alone to be morphed into a little Posette and yet the figures can't be full body morphed without looking terrible and forget trying to scale any body parts. I think the Millenium 3 figures by DAZ have very good mesh flow, very robust for deforming and scaling but I use mainly the Reduced Resolution figures because it is the mesh flow not the mesh density that makes Millenium 3 so robust. The bloat mentality has lead not only to dense mesh that gives no render advatage, I seldom see renders over 2048 pixels to the long side but more likely than not each figure in the average render has half a dozen 4000x4000 textures when one well laid out 2048x2048 would certainly suffice,,, is there a reason to have each body part mapped to a texture twice the final render size? Back with Posette if you needed detail work you could just take out a group/material like a face or head and blow it up on its own map. The so-called big head or big hand maps.

Excess resolution forces people to work with very simple scenes or resort to render paces and compositing, complex mapping makes it impossible for typical Photoshop users to create textures, and overly complex .cr2 prevent normal users from distributing morphs or hacking figures. It is easier to add erc magnets or subdivide a mesh let's say then to strip a complicated .cr2 or down sample a mesh. Poser made most of its innovation from users hacking simple .cr2s and .pz2s but then those inovations get appropriated by DAZ and burried in code that prevents users from fiddling with them. The thing I loved about Poser was the fact that all the content was in coherent text files that could be edited in notepad.

In 1992 I had an IBM XP running DOS with a 350kb UI called WinDOS... I am now running Vista which requires a Gb of RAM overhead... as a user I see no advantage. In the mid 1990s I had MAC software all under 500kb that had all the functionality of my current nearly 100MB photo editing, painting, database and wordprocessor applications but were much more stable and often faster. The bloat keeps me upgrading and renders my favorite applications and accessories obsolete and incompatable but it doesn't improve my productivity in the least. It serves the companies I buy from, not me the user.

As for the community, it used to be a DYI community of sharing and innovation but now it has become a market place. Even still though, most of the truly radical inovation is done by people who to some degree give it away, Face_Off tells how to do the set ups that he selss scripts to do, ockham, svdl, bagginsbill give their work away. but back in the time of Morphworld and Kozoburo there were litterally dozens, maybe a hundred skilled inovators sharing their work as hobiest rather than thousands selling dial spin and Merchant Resource texture "characters". No, one one has a moral obligation to give their work away but people sure had fun back when stuff went out not even with liscence agreements or EULAS. People worked for fame and the satisfaction of becoming a virtuoso... now every newbie is a merchant wanabee and I can tell you... given my stats in the high upper end of sales, few people make money in this game, unless you live in Eastern Europe or Africa Poser is not an economical way to generate income... a few hours work as a graphic artist can earn ten times what months of work developing Poser content can generate. In a way the fiction of making a full time living as a Poser merchant fuels the whole Poser economy.

Sorry for typos... I'm typing in the dark.