Quote - The first hypothesis is that they are getting ready to phase out Bryce and Hexagon.

Bryce is pretty old code by now, and practically no one uses (spit!)Hexagon. Makes perfect sense.

The outsourcing of the Bryce codebase also makes sense... it's way cheaper than developing it in-house, and if you don't particularly care what happens to a given program strategy-wise, then outsourcing it makes perfect sense. I think the only reason they're continuing to bother with it at all is the existing and continuing userbase.

Now Carrara represents one hell of an original monetary and human investment, and is something I can see them continuing to push (or push harder?) That said, I doubt that it has too awful much market penetration. 

Quote - What happened in the last few weeks? DS4 + Genesis. If we posit that sales of those items are way below DAZ management expectations (read pipe dreams) this action becomes understandable.

The base figure is free (just like the base V4 figure was, and the base A3 figure was, and the base V3 figure, etc...) Sales of the morph kits were always somewhat slow at first until other content started requiring 'em, so IMHO that's not a very reliable metric either.

The rest is intriguing, but was missing some critical info.  I hope I can help out with some of that, but it's been awhile.

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PJ calls it perfectly about the alleged "financial difficulties" - no need to elaborate. I also find it humorous that those who claim these difficulties mysteriously have no recollection or inkling as to where they heard it from.  

I can claim that Bill Gates is about to write Renderosity a check for $10 billion, but damned if I can recall where I heard that from. Somehow, I doubt that Tim will suddenly call his bank and ask about rate breaks for large deposits, though. 

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SnowSultan: What have you been up to lately? 

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Dear "stepson": 

Kindly show where I bash any company, product, or a specific group of fan-critters  in that post you quoted. 

I'll save you the time: A pox on both of your houses. 

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"I didn't much care for Stephanie 3 (her head is weird and too big), so I don't really care if I miss out on version 4 because I'm a Poser user."

Same here, though I still admit to a fetish for the original Aiko variant of S3. (evil grin)

"I'm not about to switch to another program that has an interface that I find alien, and where the majority of my content doesn't work."

Can't blame you viz. any new UI (most folks hate learning stuff they're not used to), but unless you have almost all dynamic hair/clothing, I'm wondering why you think that the majority of your content doesn't work...

"And I can't see a huge number of content creators continuing to support Poser 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Pro 2010 and 2012 and Daz|Studio."

Kind of a strawman there... if it works in Poser 5, it'll pretty much work in everything else, unless Smith Micro somewhere decided to stop doing backwards compatibility in their code design (they didn't).

That brings it down to just two variants (D|S and Poser), unless you want to include the positively ancient Poser 4 .rsr format.