Quote - I said years ago that Poser should concentrate on maintaining elegance and simplicity, rather than rushing to add features that can't meet that criteria.

Sorta disagree... but only in that if Poser can make the features user-friendly to an average high school kid, they'd make a lot more progress in seeing it implemented.

Quote - A bit more inconvenient truth as I see it. Most users don't give a horse's hindquarters about dynamic cloth/hair because they see it as too complex. (Optitex is easy to use but Daz f---ed that up big time).

The dynamic hair still suffers from a straw-like affliction, but that can be weeded out, and if the UI can be simplified (with perhaps an 'advanced' tab for the geeks), it would get used more often. Say they cough up some presets (short hair, medium hair, long hair), a "curly" slider (from razor-straight on one extreme to 'kitchen scrubbie' on the other), and a 'go' button. 

Same with dynamic cloth.

Oh, damnit - bear with me here, because there's one thing that's always bothered me about the dynamic features, and I gotta say it...

For fuck sakes - all you really need to do is have the user:

1. position the damn thing on or over the body, and dial any morphs it may come with

2. set a slider labelled "silk" on one end and "aluminum foil" on the other, and

3. click a big, fat "Drape" button.

That's. Fucking. It. 

Sure - the geeks among us can twaddle with the advanced settings, but to present a basic user with more switches, knobs, and dials than the friggin' Space Shuttle? That's a prime example of piss-poor UI design.

Here's a clue: You should not need a tutorial window right there in the app eating desktop real-estate just so your users can make use of the feature. I mean, c'mon, it's a simulated cloth moving its parts in one direction - down. Most cloth simulators take less than a megabyte of coding, and that includes the viewer to see it. 

Behind the scenes, you convert the shape into a constrained NURBS or springs object, and drape the fucker with basic collision detection. Every second-year CS student on the planet writes code to do this.

In D|S' case, I know why their nightmare came about - Optitex is a high-end tech for the fashion industry that's licensed out (the original Optitex app costs more than Maya used to), and contract terms prevent DAZ from doing anything all that workable with it. It came along after I left, so I have no idea how that particular crazy-assed UI came to be.

Quote - As to the figures, it is absolutely SM's concern and at this point, it better be a critical one. They've been content to do mediocre, knowing that Vickie had their backs - surprize! Contracting out is no excuse for 2nd rate. It's all well and good to say make your own morphs, but most users don't make morphs. Beyond basic expressions and maybe a body shape, they probably don't even use the existing ones that much (more of a guess than a conviction on that). They want pretty out of the box and plenty of pretty one-click characters.

...if only I could have these words bronzed and put on a plaque for all to see... :)

Quote - Most users are not going to cream over some, however wonderful community figure unless it has comparable support to the DS figures - and did I say pretty? Free and technically superior ain't gonna get it done - see Linux.

First, you suck. Second, you're right, and I have to agree. Linux has come a long way (see also all those Android phones out there), but unless the user can see and use it immediately, it's not going to get much traction.