Quote - Now, while some seem to like playing with shaders they scare me half to death. Procedures such as VSS, GC or IDL should work in the background, with a list of tick boxes - IDL Y/N, VSS Y/N etc, because otherwise people like me just won't use them.

That would be ideal yeah but the problem is that these features are pretty technical to begin with and difficult to simplify beyond a certain point. I mean you could reduce it all down to on/off choices (and a lot of this has already been done for poser) but then you'd run into situations where you're getting 10x the render time or 1/10th the render quality because on/off doesn't cover your particular project properly. It's generally easier to just admit that computers are dumb and leave it to their human masters to figure out what all numbers/buttons to use.