Mind you, I agree with Sean's basic assessment, but there's a couple of things that could use some expansion.

Quote -
Having said that, consider how complicated computers have become in the decade and a half since Illustrator 3. Every manufacturer has a different approach and uses a different graphics card, a different this, a different that.

Actually, it is far more complex, but far more stable than you think, especially with our particular corner of the world.

The complexity is mostly hardware, which has gone wild with options and new tech.

However, all that hardware has to hew to common software APIs, which has been far more stable over time than you suspect...

On the Mac side, OSX has had Carbon and Cocoa since it first launched nine years ago... and the only changes of note so far have been the inclusion of Universal Binaries, and the gradual phasing-out of Carbon (which was originally meant to be a temporary compatibility bennie anyway).

On the Windows side, everything began shifting to .NET back in 2001 or so, though C++ still works just fine on it for the engines and heavy-lifting. Aside from DirectX (which most of the CG world ignores), there really hasn't been too many big bumps, with most of those being related to Vista and security changes. If you wrote your code correctly in the first place, you wouldn't have had to worry too much even about that (and yes, this is a OSX/Linux guy praising them for that).

For UI and eye-candy issues, OpenGL hasn't really done too much at all as far as disrupting compatibility since Poser 5 (when it first got OpenGL inclusions, IIRC), which came out, what 6 years ago? I'm fairly sure that 6-year-old OpenGL calls should still work just fine today, with only minimum disruption (which is why you use OGL in the first place, so you don't have to go chasing multiple version shifts on multiple cards to accommodate multiple vidcard drivers/modules, etc).

It wouldn't have taken too much effort for SM/eF/EGI/CL/whoever to rewrite to pure OGL, with UI elements written to either .NET or Cocoa (or do what DAZ did and go straight to Qt for that).

For a bit of a comparison, take a peek at Unreal Tournament (the game) sometime. Its codebase is well over ten years old now, it has gained a shedload of features and GPU-punishing horsepower, yet its UI and core are still as flexible and nimble as a Russian gymnast overdosed on Glucosamine. 

Hell, look at OSX. An operating system is 5000x more complex than anything Poser can come up with, has to play nicely with bare metal (which does change with alarming frequency), and yet each iteration of OSX runs faster and smoother (so far) than previous versions.

Quote - I dont know what you're running, but I think I can say, with pretty good assurance, that the problem is not Smith Micro's not building a program that can run but one that has problems with whatever the set up is on your specific machine.

Not so sure about that one, either. Apples come in a very (relatively) small variety of flavors, with little in the way of hardware or OS customization (now if it were typical for Mac users to be playing with Onyx or other system tweakers, okay... but c'mon - it ain't that common at all).

Even on the Windows side, we've got, what, NVIDIA, ATI, or Intel (blecch) for video (all of which implement OpenGL, DX, SDL, Qt whatever), common frameworks for Vista or XP/2000 (with, granted, service packs)? None of these are insurmountable (thanks to Visual Studio), truth be told. So unless we're talking about gamers whose home page happens to be Tom's Hardware or hexus.net, I doubt that it would be all that big of a deal on the Windows side either.

Quote - In the main, Poser 7 has been the most stable release of this thing since version 4. True, it's not perfect, but no program these days is: everything has some weird little bug that no one caught in testing because the manufacturers dont have access to an infinite number of computers and their respective operating systems to work with.

Depends on the bug, really... little errors that only occur under certain obscure conditions usually don't (and honestly shouldn't) be worried about unless/until the biggies are squashed.

OTOH, if the bug is systemic and tends to break things under common conditions, well...