Interesting post, SnarlyG. You bring up some very thought-provoking points about workflow.

Upon thinking on it, my initial "inspiration" ... um, there really is none. I usually start out because I am trying to learn something new about Poser, following a tutorial or one of the forum threads on here. My emphasis has been - particularly of late - to create scenes that reflect the glimpse of a moment: a snatch of conversation, where someone caught me, perhaps a visual commentary on the state of the art.

I start by posing. Nothing in the scene, ordinary default lights, no props. My 'puter is not the slowest, nor is it the fastest, so I have to work within some limits.

In the past, I spent a lot of time inserting node sets to correct textures and colours. This would allow me to set lighting appropriately based on the materials, instead of having the light have to compensate for materials that were not corrected. Now, with PP2010 - brilliant investment! - all I do is make sure that texture filtering for colour maps is appropriate, and gamma settings for non-colour maps has been set to 1. I'll still go into new items and change the diffuse_value to .85 (from 1) and untick Reflection_Lite_Mult and get rid of disconnected nodes: surprising how many of those are scattered over the material room floor. I'll save out my changes for future use since this part of the process does represent a fair amount of time.

Lighting is my weak point. I currently re-doing the IDL for P8 tutorial by Bagginsbill: stuffed it up the last time. I'll render at full settings for a dozen or more renders, taking forever.

And by this time, I'm usually sick of the image and end up not posting it in my gallery, and that's why I have so few. That, and when compared to some of the really fine work in the galleries, my stuff is pretty ordinary.

Monterey/Mint21.x/Win10 - Blender3.x - PP11.3(cm) - Musescore3.6.2

Wir sind gewohnt, daß die Menschen verhöhnen was sie nicht verstehen
[it is clear that humans have contempt for that which they do not understand] 

Metaphor of Chooks