"It would be easy for DAZ to modify the installers with a wildcard such as Poser.exe"* 

which would pick up poseray.exe probably among others, though that may only be a technical point.

"  it would be easier still if they simply refrained from micromanaging, demanding that the installation be made in the primary runtime."

Agree 100%

" Further more the installers are nothing more than self extracting zip files."

Not the case AFAIK. Neither WinRAR nor WinZip will open them. They (the latest ones) are Bitrock installer files. You can use a special utility to extract some of the older versions, but there is no runtime structure inside them - all the files are dumped in one place.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken