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My image took a matter of seconds to set up and uses no lights, no images, no nodes, no surfacing tricks, just a background colour.  Your image is not bad, but no cigar. You'll have to turn on Poser's radiosity to do better. Yeah, try this at home kids.

Yeah, you used a backdrop color and global illumination. LightWave would be my guess, with Final Gather, maybe just backdrop only. Could be modo, too, or maybe Cinema, but it looks like a LW render to me.

I could do that all day long, too, with LW. That's your basic model presentation "clay" type of render - no effort, no setup at all other than loading and dialing the light to 0, selecting a backdrop or sky color, and turning on shadows and GI.

However, I didn't heed your warning. I did do this at home. For that matter, I do this at home quite a bit, and it's not really caused any noticeable harm yet.

I think what bagginsbill is on about is doing it in Poser, which is exceedingly difficult to get that look. While I myself don't have the patience much of the time to try to get a decent render out of Poser, and will use LightWave for that, loads of people here don't have that option. I'm pretty sure he's trying to help them out, not looking for a confrontation with you.

As for my comments, why I was happy to learn about this, I occasionally try to get good results from Poser, if I happen to be in the mood to deal with it. For the same reason anyone does anything difficult - just because. But also I sometimes try to establish the type of look I might want before exporting everything. I think they call that pre-visualization. And Poser is quite a good tool to use for it, due to its ease of use and speed.