Quote - Poser smothing does more than just fiddle with the normals, which you can easily see if you try that feature on a mesh which isn't made for it- I had bulging furniture, bulging wooden beams, all kinds of stuff.

IMHO smoothing in Poser is subdivison, but it's not Catmull-Clark. It does not look like Doo-Sabin either, but I'm not sure about that. Try to smooth a model with big, thin polygons and see what Poser does.

 

But I hope for Catmull-Clark in Poser 10 too. It would do a lot of things much easier. 

You don't have to subdivide to get that bulging. If, in fact, your model doesn't have beveled edges that will happen in any program when you smooth it. Not only that, but your edges won't shade realistically if you don't bevel them. Beveling edges is one of the first things they teach you in modeling.