Quote - But then here comes 9/2012 and now Poser is weight mapping too, but in a different way, perhaps, and there was no cross-talk between the companies because, presumably, too much competitive secrecy. [...]

I'm pretty certain they handle weight mapping almost exactly the same actually, they both seem to have extended Poser's original volume-falloff approach that's been in use since the beginning.  The major problem right now is that Poser does not do Catmull-Clark subdivision.  Either side of the problem could solve it, but preferably SM would add subdivision to Poser.

My Freebies