Quote - All I'm saying is that there may be corner cases (no pun intended) where some manual tweaking will be necessary for optimal results. I'm sure we'll find some good strategies that will work most of the time, though. For example, if you're rendering an urban scene with lots of architecture and other background objects, you could turn all smoothing (per-vertex normals as well as polygon subdivision) off by default and only activate it selectively for a few foreground figures and objects if you find that they have problems with their shading.

That would be a lot of work: Imagine a Stonemason scenery (huge, very detailed, often lots of props, sharp and smoothed edges everywhere), with a couple organics running around in it (all with clothes, hair, and so on). Editing this, item by item, would be very tedious, especially if you need to let it render for 5-10 minutes to get an idea what needs (more) tweaking and what not..

Quote - Or you could let the exporter guess and make a correction or two if it guesses wrong.

I vote for that (you might have guessed by now...), the exporter must to be able to guess right most of the time, and only need manual editing in special cases, like when the model has smoothing problems to start with, or is too complicated. Poser does manage to guess what to smooth and what not, this information should be used and translated.