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I find it interesting to see all of the complaints about the rendering engine, Firefly.

Don't get me wrong, I used to loathe Firefly too. But the problem wasn't the render engine, it was me, the operator.

If you've been following Bagginsbill's Material Room tutorials, you know you can get a whole lot more out of Firefly if you learn the Material Room advanced options. He's just unlocking all of the doors for us math-poor folks, and the results are truly amazing.

Poser's powerful material room is because of the Firefly render engine.

That may very well be, and yes, bagginsbill has it down about as good as anyone can get in Firefly.

But why defend something that needs an infinite amount of tweaking and all that learning just to get something decent? Even programs like Maya have the basic settings for reflection, shadows, transparency and all that good stuff, which can be used right out of the box and which work as one would expect.
Then of course, you have your Mental Ray and MR shaders and all that, which Poser's material room could be very loosely compared to (and I do mean loosely). In Maya, if you want to learn how to render effectively with MR shaders and materials, then you have alot of learning to do.
In Firefly, if you want to render anything that looks really good, you have alot of learning to do. Hell, you can't even point a light at something and turn on shadows and expect it to look good without a whole lot of tweaking and experimenting.
That's normal for 3D, but what isn't normal is Poser's default lights and shadows simply suck without a whole lot of tweaking. Without a whole lot of knowledge about the material room, you might as well forget about quickly setting up a scene to use as a quick visualization for a project. Even the - ahem- "pro" version is still total crap for that purpose. And I would think pros would appreciate something which enables them to do a quick pre-viz.