Poser is not an all-in-all 3d program, that you can use on its own to make images. It heavily depends on its capability to import models you or someone else created in other 3d programs. So Poser should strive to be able to import every 3d-format in existence. That includes the daz-studio format. But of course they should try to include others, too, what could a .max license cost?

SM is not a content factory, they make software. And as interesting it would be for them to start seriously making characters, i think they should concentrate an what they can do best for now, and probably that means for them making software. Of course, i know that they will do what they believe they can do best, which may be a totally different thing (i have no idea what that is).

As for the software improvements, i think they should do is making things work well that currently do not work well. I often get the impression Poser is not a single program, but actually a bunch of programs, namely Poser 4, Poser 5 and Poser 8, which they somehow managed to stuff into a single window on the desktop. For example:

you can enable GC on one texture, because it is a color, but then it will change to GC for every material within Poser, even when not used as a color.

It has this cool feature called dependent parameters, that you can use to make some values change based on other values, and it has another cool feature called "point at" to change one objects orientation based on another objects position, but those two are not combinable with each other for no obvious reason.

Any figure seems to use some version of it with the valueOpDeltaAdd or something like that in the cr2 file which you cannot create from within Poser, but only with a texteditor and some hours reading lesbentley's posts. I wonder if the programmers of the dependent parameters and the programmers of the valueOpDeltaAdd ever met in person.

The general rule seems to be: The older and more established any poser feature is, the more i would guess it would be easily accessible, but for some reason this is not the case -- the older a feature in Poser is, the more likely you will need a text editor to use it.

I think sooner or later they must bring all those features together into one program, otherwise nobody will understand anymore what and when something works and when it does not. Sure all new features are nice, but i would not be surprised if they implemented, say Catmull Clark, but in such a way that you could not use it with magnets at the same time or something like that.