I've been using poser and d|s for a long time, first i have p4(pp) and D|S(1.2 or so) and at first studio impresed me in that it haves a faster and accurate render than poser.
Okay from my point of view that's a goood point for D|S, but when I came across with the shader system in p6 it shoked me, i havent see something similar(powerful yet easy to use) since Flamingo(Rhino photorrealistic render engine) but now D|S came with the same thing ..... I don't know why all that noise about, P8 will be released soon and, what it will be?
To me, poser have some good reasons to still be on my hd, i.e. it's easy to make the pose you want, the shader system is powerful yet stable, of course we all want a mighty program that let you render over a network, make caustics, volumes, hdribl, gi/radiosity, full raytracing and more!
but, that program, as far as I know, does not exist (yet) so if Daz makes a bettes Studio, and give soime of that for free, hey I'm happy with that, and if charges for the plugins, we're taking great programs for our money, and the D|S base release always have behaved great to me

...wow that sounds like some at daz wrote it...

and last but not least I can only make daz run into my Slackware!!!!
:thumbupboth: