On the subject of Poser's complexity - I'm not sure why that should be a problem. You have always had a lot of control over the ui, so you only need to have what you use and understand up there, while most of the harder stuff is kept in rooms you never need to visit.

Having said that, SM did release a Starter edition, which is cheap and fills the role of Poser 4 nicely with pleny of handy features and nothing to confuse you - as well as the friendly manual. It's robust too, so a newbie can use it on a fairly cheap/old computer - I've been able to install Poser on my netbook with no graphics card and no problem! (Some of you may be thinking "Why the hell bother putting it on a netbook?" but I have a runtime full of toons which make nice illustrations for my family emails)