Sex sells.
Always has.
Hopefully, always will.

The problem in that area is that there can be too great a concentration on the 'in your face' style of sex....just because it's 'easy'. Once you get out of the fetish area, what is 'sexy' gets into the very subjective gray area of 'I'll know it when I see it'. T shirt, shorts, and sandals can be slobbing around or hellishly sexy, depending on the wearer, the attitude, and the viewers taste. That tends to scare off the timid, as there is too much of a current want for a 'sure thing'. And so we get variant #166 of that outfit WhosiswhatisDaddy did X years ago that =everyone= wanted because it was so unique and new.

On the tech end we've had a long, dry spell that is only beginning to break up. Part of it has been due to DAZ's decision to keep their compatibility at P4/PP levels. A lot of vendors deliberately avoided the newer gimmicks in P5-PP2010 for that reason. But that was only part of it. Fear of learning new things was a much bigger part. Dynamic cloth has been in since P5, and opens up the area for fitting different sized characters without a lot of work. But users were and are scared of it, and quite a few content creators as well. Same with dynamic hair and the shader room. Sergemarck's period clothing was and still is fanstastic.....but he has gone elsewhere. Adorana's hair is excellent both to use and to study how it's done.....but the site seems to be temporarily gone. Bagginsbill has been the driving force behind the increase in actual shader usage....but as of yet there seems to be no apprentice to keep the ideas out there, should he decide to move on. The innovators are still there, and always have been.....but the layers of 'Buy it loadit renderit' users has increased. Which may be good for business, but truly can smash the creativity out of the best of us.

Odf's work with Antonia is one example of how to beat this. He started her, and is the guiding hand in her making. Then he got Phantom3D interested in rigging her. BB started working on shader tricks for her eyes, and produced some of the best looking eyes seen so far. Others began to show interest, and at least on content maker took the plunge and experimented with dynamic cloth....and got jazzed. Which is the 3rd problem.

People are jaded. VickyMikeVickyMikeVickyMikeAkoAkoGirl etc....... I grab every decently crafted and rigged figure mesh I can get my hands on, as that sameness is like getting smacked over and over. Eventually, you feel nothing. It is looking like there may be a schism between Poser and DS in the offing, which might be a good thing. Particularly if they get a solid 3rd party interface like Collada working fully.