I'm personally skeptical that any open discussion can take place with DAZ using the internet forum medium.  (Disclaimer: I have had substantive discusions with Rand and Dan by email.)

So a few questions for Rand and Dan to think about:

• How can DAZ hope to recapture the goodwill of the Poser customer base through an uncontrolled policy of censorship and bans on their own forums?   This is where the discussion should have been taking place.  Why come here to a third parties forums when you're unwilling to discuss the issues in your own house, so to speak?   When will you revamp your forum policies so that you can get feedback from all your customer base?
• As a former DAZ PA, I felt strongly pressured by DAZ to stop work on V4/M4 series products and focus all my efforts on DS4 & Genesis.   Since DAZ as a Broker is always at the concent of DAZ to accept a product, this is clearly attempting to drive PAs in a specific direction.   Shouldn't DAZ just be clear about this?
• DAZ's PA process and how it selects what to broker is fundamentally opaque.   There seems to be no written criteria as to what DAZ wants from PAs and has to be obtained purely from folklore and statements by PA team managers in a non-public forum.   Shouldn't DAZ make clear what they want to broker, for what tehcnologies, in a public way?   
• Why was Poser compatibility such a low priority in the Genesis release cycle?   Should DAZ have made that an up front need?   Much of the angst now felt by customers and PAs alike is that the compatibility appears (I am not saying it is, but appears) to be of a low priority.
• Why has the necessary documentation and SDKs been so absense, that third parties have been somewhat disabled from filling the gap?   (I applaud D3D's work at moving morphs, at least one way, into DS4.)   A major discouragement is that the DSF format is poorly documented and is not, at least as of today, likely to be fully stable.   This disables thrid parties from improving Genesis to Poser (and vice-versa).  Should DAZ put a much higher priority on documentation and format stability to reduce the risks for 3rd parties. 
• DAZ and its followers frequently excoriate (always wanted to use that word in a post) SM for not adopting DAZ technologies.   Has DAZ adopted capsule zones and dependent parameters in DS4?  PMDs?  Can you please show us your roadmap to make DS4 more compatible with existent poser technologies.
• While we're on the subject of technology, what about shader tree/map compatibility with poser?   For me this has been near the #1 reason why DS4 has trouble with existing Poser content created by 3rd parties (including some DAZ brokered artists.)
• When will DAZ support preview of realistic light fall-offs in DS4?   How about preview of those falloffs?   The dependency on plugins for lighting features is a productivity killer.

I'm not saying these things to be mean to DAZ.   I wish DAZ well and continue to by content from DAZ almost every week, but my own journey as longtime customer of DAZ, becoming a PA, and then becoming an ex-PA have made me keenly sensitive to the business and technical issues raised above.   DAZ has asked to command a premium price for its content, and to win my business it needs to start acting like a premium business.

 

Cheers!

-Kerwin

 

[Wow!  Nearly 20 posts at Renderosity in 12 years!   I'm becomming dangerously outspoken! :) ]