Quote - As a matter of fact, I'd be willing to go on record to say that the very fewest neophytes feel a burning desire to know about vertices, splines and polygons.

:: nervously raises hand ::

I... I'm one of them... actually...  :|

Quote - ... what they really want to know is how to put someone in a temple, slap a sword in her hand and turn the scene into art.

Sadly, their hopes are quickly deflated the moment they discover there is no Make Art button.

For me, the single most difficult hurdle was understanding content management and file/folder structure.

I started noodling around with 3D art when DAZ first came on the scene back in 2006.  Unfortunately, I didn't create anything with it until 2008 because I found it overwhelmingly difficult to understand exactly how files and folders were structured in a way that the program could read them, nevermind trying to figure out how the Content Manager worked.  I experience the same headache with the trial version of Poser 5.  Worse, I learned about as many different ways to organize content as there were tutorials on the subject.  Once I finally grasped the concept of external runtimes, everything I had studied about both topics finally clicked.  I spent the next three months creating my first series of renders.

I finally understood that I don't have to extract everything I download into DAZ or Poser's runtime libraries, or make sure all of the appropriate files are in their respective folders.  I keep all of my content archived and organized with my own filing system until I need something, at which point I simply extract whatever I need into an external Project runtime.  Once I'm done with the Project, I delete the runtime.  I keep my hdd very nice and tidy that way.  In fact, the only things occupying Poser's runtime is its legacy content, and the base and morphs++ for M4 and V4.  Everything else is archived in a separate Downloads folder.