The thing that is lost from the old days is the "community" feeling.
Its rare that a dialog is maintained from SM reps with us here at rendo. It was retty much an ongoing thing in the past, especially with Metacreations. Even Kai Krause was around back then.
The last really big dialog session was when Anthony Hernandez used to be here. He was about the last one.

Steve Cooper has now been here a bit since SM, however.

The SM website is not built for an artist, that is for sure. And poser is indeed buried with a lot of other mundane and useless offerings, scrape ups from other developers that were barely, if at all, getting by in sales. SM is like a liquidation site of random offerings.

I just went from P6 to P8. A lot of you desire UI changes, etc, but the worst thing, imo, that has happened to P8, is the new library. Its slow, I need to refresh it constantly, it displays multiples of the same object. Its supposed to drag and drop..it does not.
The UI is perfect for me. I love the Kai interface. nothing worse than menu based graphics apps.

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it.
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together.
All things connect......Chief Seattle, 1854