I would say that with Poser 8, it finally seems on track towards becoming something far better than it ever was before, but it's not there yet. Not even close, IMO, but it's good to see they're at least heading in the direction they should have headed in about 5 years ago.

Not the library though. I guess I'm in the minority, but certainly not the only one who thinks they took the wrong path there. I mean, come on - having to install Flash for IE to be able to use a very important feature in Poser? You can't load figures or anything else any other way, so I suppose that counts as a game-killing thing there if you don't have Flash installed.

Why not something more typical? Max, Softimage, Maya, and Lightwave people seem to have no problems with that whole content directory scheme and it's part of the program, and doesn't depend on some other program being installed. And while Poser's whole Runtime scheme is similar to those program's content schemes, the other programs can switch between content directories just fine, and quickly, but without the added complications of adding Flash into the mix.
Well, OK, maybe some of the C++2005 redistributables or other similar things have to be there in the system, but those are included in the installers for the most part, if not already installed. Just like most games will install DirectX along with the game.

And the whole premise... sure get your Poser stuff into your scene quicker, but it still takes 20 times longer to set up a scene when you factor in dicking around with the lights for an hour to get something good, poor translation tools, and no prop grouping and things like that, not to mention that even though P8 renders faster, it's still ridiculously slow in comparison to all other 3d apps for what it does.

So I hope to see that in the future they'll start considering some of these other things, as well as listen to what some of the people are saying.