I have them both, and perhaps it is because I now know Poser so much better, but I run into dead ends all the time with DS3A.

The meshes on clothing breaks up every time I pose a character.  When I ask what I'm doing wrong I get "that happens sometimes in DS3A".

I find that clothes bulge funny in DS3A, again, "that happens sometimes"

I couldn't get a good alpha from DS3A, the characters had unworkable halos.  "that happens sometimes".

As far as the shader goes, I'm going to go with trekkiegrrrl, I sorely miss the material room.  Yes the shader mixer is .... ok, but you can only modify the DS basic shader.  So essentially, you're starting from scratch building the nodes from there.  It would be nice if you could start with, say, UberSurface and add an occlusion node.  I'm sure this will change in the future, and would change if I used it more and got used to it, but ... wow, that seems like alot of work to just add an occlusion node.

Another thing I miss that no one seems to rave about is the ease of comparing renders in Poser.  You have to open a new window in DS3A, and if you close the application, there isn't a cache.

I don't understand the scaling issues that Freak 4 has, and why Poser 8 doesn't work properly with them.  I wish I understood what was wrong with Poser there.

I do like DS3A, and I'm trying to use it some.

Indi.