This is the typical lighting setup I use lately:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/rrfilelock/download.php?fileid=33527&key=8122

The constraints that Pixar works under have zero to do with a single user producing stills (95% of Poser use).  Feature length film productions prefer depth-mapped shadows because they render quicker than raytraced by a big margin, not because they're of higher quality.  When you have to render 30 frames per second, times 60 seconds, times 90 minutes for a typical feature film, rendering even 10% faster can mean a tremendous cost savings.  In stills, depth mapped shadows will pretty much always be of inferior quality - and while they do render faster, for your typical still frame image that's largely unimportant. 

If image quality is less valuable to you than render time, then depth mapped shadows may be what you want ^^

Quote - If one cannot get the right effect from lighting that has global effect, that tells me that something else is wrong, and I'd much rather have that fixed than see lights that can be specified to only affect particular objects in the scene.

That's the problem, Poser can't do lighting that has a real global effect (global illumination).  It behaves in a way that is fundamentally NOT realistic, and this limitation has to be worked around with many fill lights and other tricks - which create problems of their own, since you may not want a character casting shadows in three or four different directions e.g.

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