Actually this business of runtime awareness (what folder you're currently loading something from) is very squarely Smith Micro/EF's problem.  There is an operating system function that will get the current working directory (or file location, or a variety of things) that they just didn't implement and didn't make use of.  The ability to get the current working directory etc. is present in every single programming language and nearly all scripting languages I've ever worked with (and yes it's present in Python).  If Poser is able to see files, read them in and display them on your screen, there is no technical reason this could never have been done, I'm kinda baffled why they never implemented any kind of sanity checking for "what runtime am I loading this thingy from".  It doesn't really bother me since I only use two runtimes though, and this practically never comes up for me.  There might be some excuse or other why this was never done but I think it was just a low priority item that they just never bothered with.

I had thought the DAZ updater makes a number of text edits on stuff residing in the !DAZ folder, which is then read in by the various readScript commands in the vanilla CR2 (which is why previously saved CR2s don't recognize new updated stuff, because all their stuff is saved into a single CR2 and there are no more readScript lines).  If you really wanted to test this - and I don't recommend it - you could remove all of a given figure's folder in the !DAZ folder, reinstall the base, take a snapshot of that, and then install an update and see what exactly is changed.  I can see from looking at their contents that Stephanie's files are all those containing "pe082" in their filenames (apparently she was delayed, since She-Freak 4 is pe085).

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