Quote - I don't understand why beginners jump to trying to deal with clothes and hair.

Easy to understand, BB. If a noob sees a programme advertised as easy, he or she won't naturally think: "oh, I but I do need to get my head around proper lighting and materials, first." Noobs launch into this programme with that "Easy" bit as a motivator and just want to dress their figures and render. And are invariably disappointed and frustrated.

We're looking at workflow, here. In DS (which I cut my teeth on) a lot of that stuff is set up a bit differently, and perhaps allows someone without doing much reading or studying to at least have the load - conform - pose - render workflow work for them. You can't leverage your experience with DS... totally different workflow!

They would quail at my current workflow.

Not that my workflow is so sophisticated, but the honeymoon phase has evaporated ages ago, and I know to create decent renders in Poser involves a LOT of reading ( on here, tutorials, the manual - when all else fails :biggrin: ) and slow steps and playing extensively with each aspect of the scene until one gets a grasp of it. Sheesh, I'm still playing with your IDL scene, BB... (messing with different things just to see when the different components do). None of these images I end up rendering these days will ever end up in my so-called gallery: a gallery is for art, and these are studies... light studies:

Click image for a larger (2 meg) version.

My focus would be to get your head around this programme and get your $200 bucks out of it. The more time you spend with it, the more you will realise that $200 for all it can do and all the directions you can go with it is really quite reasonable. No, it's not easy, but then, nothing worthwhile is.

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