Quote - > Quote - This is probably my misconception, but I always get the feeling that D/S limits certain options in order to twist the user's arm into buying something extra. This seems to be less the case with this version (hence the price for D/S Advanced, which I'm all in favour of and which appears very reasonable), but I'd need more convincing.

That's not a misconception, that's the way they've always pushed the plugins for DAZ|Studio.  The base version is "free" but really it's just an introduction to the DAZ store, they've always made their money off of brokering/selling content.  Frankly if they were REALLY clever they'd give the new version of D|S away truly for free and (unless it's terrible, which would be a bit of a surprise) suddenly "Poser Pro" would be junk.  The real problem with getting people to take Poser content seriously in the larger world is not the content itself, it's getting it into a render engine that doesn't produce 1990's quality results.  Video games render with higher quality than base D|S!

I thought Poser started the whole content thing.  No other program can output a rigged Poser figure, nor can it read one from any other program either.  Even little things like edge creases and poly groups are so specific to the way it works as to necessitate 3rd party tools and editors.  
As for giving away D|S Pro, why would they?  They've been giving away the regular version for years and I assume will continue to do so.  That's all they need to get people hooked on content and then they can start grooming them to buy the Pro version later.  

Many modern video games do render better than base Studio, and also quite faster than firefly.  Yet it seems like I'm the only one here who thinks that Poser's OpenGL viewport should be brought up to Unreal Engine 3 quality so that I could render animations in near-real time.  Bumpmaps and soft shadows in the viewport are all I've ever asked for, but don't seem to be of any use to anyone else here.