"The format is recognized by Renderman, but that requires Maya--or the in-house Pixar stuff we don't get to play with." 

As far as I can tell, Renderman isn't native to Maya, it requires a plugin. One such plugin is 3Delight for Maya. 3delight is of course, the render engine for Daz Studio. DS, (at least in the standard version not sure about advanced), doesn't surface all the functionality of 3delight but there is a plugin which supposedly does. From a strictly technical standpoint, it seems that it would probably be easier to implement in DS than in Poser. Unless it offers substantial advantages with a low learning curve I wouldn't expect to see it anytime soon though :-)

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken