Quote - To those who cavel that the Poser UI is hopelessly out of date, let me remind them all that Adobe's hasnt changed in twenty years. Illustrator and Photoshop look almost exactly as they did when the programs were first released.

Sometimes what works should be what works.

There is one small problem in the comparison: Photoshop opens fairly rapidly, and is still rather flexible in spite of itself. It also has the blessing of a consistent UI across the whole app. You (the user) can arrange the tools any way you want to. Note that no one is (at least I'm not) harping on the aesthetics... almost every complaint has to do with technical and usability issues - flexibility, resource usage, cruft/legacy issues, things like that...

The OS (any OS) has tools and optimization for their respective UIs now - that would be a good place to start. D|S gets away with using Qt for its UI because Qt is rapid, flexible, cross-platform, native API-friendly (be it Windows, OSX, or Xorg/XFree86), and light on resources. Poser has no such love, because its framework and rationale is based on the needs from the mid 1990s, when operating systems were barely starting to evolve on the UI front, and every app (especially those ported from DOS or MacOS < 6) was pretty much on its own (and had those crap and unscalable16-bit color --if you were lucky-- bitmaps to prove it).

In Poser, the UI is (at least IMHO) affecting the performance of the app, and it always has. Long load times, harsh image refreshes, and the ungodly high demand for system resources stand out as biggies. (...remember the old tweak to replace the 'running man' animated .gif with a blank image on the progress bar in P4/PPP - just to help move things along? I bet Poser 7 could even be similarly boosted if one could hex-edit out a lot of the UI visual elements...)

Long story short? Maybe it's time to revisit the thing and see what could be done to clean it up.

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Quote - I don't want a change just to have a change.  I want a change that will allow me to work more efficiently.

Agreed. Change for its own sake is where the Office 2k7 "ribbon" came from. We honestly do not need any of that.

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Quote - Actually, I would be satisfied if we could set up an animation 'room' without having to jump through hoops to get it. Or maybe more accurately, being able to create one to three 'rooms' or tabs that we could save as a custom arrangement

An even cooler idea (IMHO) would be to split some of the 'rooms' off as their own executables, so that a user who doesn't use certain rooms could launch Poser without having to load unused stuff (e.g. dynamics, or animation, or the face room, or etc), where it would otherwise just eat RAM and CPU cycles without any noticeable benefit to the user. Sort of like how D|S gives (gave?) 3rd-party codemonkeys the option to write their goodies as separate executables that don't load into memory until/unless they are needed and called from within the main app.