Quote - This is going to bite me square in the ass, but, how is it Smith Micro's fault that Maxwell doesn't provide a plugin for Poser?

Very simply: No API

Instead of trying to play catch up to the state of the art minus a decade, were Smith or Daz to produce a documented API, you'd see one of the render apps for Poser in no time.  Any render engine needs an API to "talk to" a host application. No API = no way to talk to the application.

This is how the entire 2D and 3D graphics industry works: plugins get written because the host application has an API to write to. That's why 3D Studio supports a dozen different high quality 3rd party renderers. That's why there are a million plugins for Photoshop.

And here we have a case of a giant user base, which really likes working with this application's content, and is willing to pay for connectivity to quality renderers, and is ignored. Instead, they're trying to add features that were old news five years ago, and get you to spend your bucks on that.

Its frustrating, its bad business, and as a user (since Poser 3), my message to Smith is: if you want me to spend money on your product, just make it talk to a quality renderer. That's worth money to me.