Thought provoking topic.

When I started Poser 3, DAZ had not spilt off from Zygote yet. The most beautiful figures around were resculpted Posettes from brilliant Japanese artists who hand painted textures. So as far as I can see, Poser has always been reliantly on third party providers.

Are we addicted to Poser or addicted to Poser content? And how many times have people posted "it'd be great if Poser had feature X" or "why does Poser keep crashing" or "how can I get my scene into a different renderer" (no disrespect to the Material Room / Firefly).  If there is no DAZ support for Poser, Poser users will still be reliant on a different 3rd party provider and a thread similar to this is posted 15 years from now.

But for all of Poser's shortcomings, the main reason why people are hesitant to move to another program, purchase price notwithstanding is ironically the amount we've invested into our Runtimes and how time consuming it would be to convert it all to a new "native" format.

So I started soul searching. As an animator, how can make this better / work easier / more efficiently for what I'm doing? I started by throwing away all the characters in my Runtime and built my own but kept the props and sets if I need something in a pinch. My characters are smooth, low-poly, they animate and render quickly.

It took a lot of dedication, time, and frustration to develop them. Turns out that DAZ figures were my biggest inspiration. The Unimesh concept is genius; my characters also share textures between them but not morphs since each individual is hand scuplted from a male or female base figure. And I learned alot about human anatomy in the process. It took a while to get used to their "realistic" proportions rather that DAZ's "ideal" proportions but that only makes me love them more. 

My solution doesn't work for everyone. I like to think of it as driving a car with an alternative energy source, independent from a reliance on a finite amount of foreign oil.