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I think experience is the key. My assumption is that most high-end renderers have shader languages that are at least as powerful as Poser's, and thus it would be almost trivial - if tedious - to take bagginsbill's materials setting and translate them into whatever renderer one likes. You don't need an experienced person for that, just someone who can hack the shader.

Okay, I totally get what you're saying there, but I'm not so sure too much hacking would be necessary. Mental ray, for example, already has several "realism" shaders built into it for various purposes, such as the architectural materials for accurate IOR, specularity, reflection, and so on, plus gradient tools, all the math nodes one would expect and SSS and all that good stuff. And Vray is even more advanced in that respect.
Of course I really can't argue with any of this as I really haven't even yet inspected what BB has done in Poser with the shaders. Nevertheless, I have seen some equally good CG eyes out of mental ray, Lightwave and Vray, so I know it's already been done. They're just few and far between because most people lack the knowledge or patience for the level of detail and accuracy like BB has achieved.

I'm still amazed he was able to do it with Poser. I really wouldn't have thought that possible. Now they just need to bring the speed of the render engine up to par and think about creating some actual "material" nodes, which have become more common these days.