Please don't crawl back into your "hole." I agree with every word.

Quote - I don't know why I am bothering to post on this but it seems to me the best strategy would be to adapt an existing figure. Say the Victoria 3 Reduced Resolution model since it is light on resources and there is still a lot of content around and software to convert V4 content etc. to it. There are new tools that make distributable changes easier, legal and kosher.

V3 makes strong male characters, kids, realistic, toon... what ever you want. Thing to do is make a V3RR variant like the Eve or Nea variant of Posette. Unimesh has great topology and sensible UVs. Re-rig with capsule fall-offs... make injection JPs for male and child variants, fix the scalability and de-particularize the face with new nostril and eyelid morphs  and create new more sophisticated expression morphs. Give her a nice vulva like Judy's. I find the Generation 3 mesh incredibly robust... a good test of a mesh is how well it can body bag disparate figure shapes...

The Poser 4 Nude figures and the DAZ3 Unimesh can be successfuly shaped to pretty much any figure... try it with Wardrobe Wizard (though the head and feet will be locked). Those mesh can do M4 and V4 beautifully but also Rikishi and other dramatically different shaped figures. Has to do with mesh flow as far as I can tell... V4 and the EF figures just break when you try that radical stuff with them.

V3 and Posette had excellent mesh... in each case it was the sculpting and rigging that failed. The problem with both DAZ and EF figures is that the designers seem loath to base them on realistic anatomy and just provide a heroic or super-model injection for them. Post-P4 Poser figures seem to have almost perversely ugly default surface sculpting and DAZ makes outlandishly stylized proportions and structural sculpting.

They just don't seem to employ artists or scale modelers in the design process... that or the desire to pander to an imagined audience distorts the hell out of the sculpting. Independent modlers seem quite capable of realism that the big companies can't or will not attempt... the big guys seem not to get that a proportional and realistic and somewhat neutral base is easier for users to change into heroic fantasy forms then a wild fantasy figure is to be turned into something half-way realistic.

As a retired commercial artist of some respectable success... I feel Poser/DAZ has miss-calculated by splitting Poser between the tech enthusiasts and Fantasy theme end-users... work-a-day artist would have embraced Poser had the figures been realistic and more non-specific in the face sculpting. I used the P4 Figures and V2 and V2 Male extensively for paid work because I could make them my own from Toon to realistic. The only problem was finding respectable clothing, realistic settings and realistic hair styles. The original Poser 4 hair was the last truly real world style hair I've seen. Not even Hollywood stars wear the Poser hair available now.

You will notice when you see commercial work that the P4 and P5 are most often used... not out of laziness by the artist as many non-professionals seem to believe but simply because they are the most appropriate figures for commercial work.

I'll climb back in my hole now.