Quote - I'm not using parchment to write on either... ;)

The nice thing about parchment is that you could still write on it if you had some.  I may use a computer, but if anybody tries to take my pencils away from me, they'll have to pry them out of my cold dead writer''s cramped hands. :)

There is an awful lot of good old content out there that didn't include png files.  DAZ, long after P5 came out, only distributed rsr files in their runtime. I don't know exactly where the cutoff will be when png and rsr files were routinely distributed with runtimes.  P4 came out in 1999 and P5 in 2003.  I'll guess that it was another 2-3 years before merchants routinely included png thumbnails with their products. That means the vast backlog of Poser products, free and commercial, aren't going to have thumbnails in Poser 8. That won't affect anybody that has large libraries of external runtimes installed in earlier versions of Poser, but it will be a royal pain for anybody installing content that they only have on disk. 

This isn't a minor problem of backward compatibility, but a fairly significant thing that will hopefully be addressed in updates.  Poser relies on external content and it's not a good thing to make it difficult to use content that was created more than a few years ago. Anybody suffering a catastrophic loss of their installed runtimes is not going to enjoy this lack of backwards compatibility when they find out that the majority of the content they reinstall has no thumbs. There are at least other solutions to fix that, but returning rsr support is a feature that is needed.

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon