Quote - Unfortunatelly Smith Micro wouldn't spend time for old figures, people always look for the new. All the default poser people in my opinion had great potential but after release it is only the community that will take advantage of those potentials.

That's a pretty safe assumption.  Thing is, they do include the older figures with the newer releases, so my question was more whether they could distribute the community revamped figures (as I think they should if they could)...  Posette with weightmapping, and an alternate remapped version (to use another more common figure's maps), and maybe a nice SSS shader set-up could practically be considered a new figure.  If they did that with every figure they currently ship with Poser, I thnk that might be a minor selling point for many people.  (Now I'm noticing that Poser9 may not in fact come with Don and Judy...)

Quote - However the success of Poser people relies on their default look, if it is neutral or attractive enough they have a bit more chances to be used (James is an example) or else people will never notice them and all the content that comes with them.

Another reason they should spend a weekend each updating the older figures.  As Daz have shown, you can stretch a sufficiently dense mesh into almost anything.  Unless they are prohibited from further modifying that content, I'd think it would be easy for them to polish up each figure for every new Poser release.

Quote - I don't even mention community support, this is minimal for default poser people, the last one with community support was AnAn who was based on P5 Woman - Judy

Again that goes back to most of them either having a critical flaw, having many small flaws, or just being so ugly that no one bothered using them.  I'm not suggesting they do some elaborate beautification to all of their figures, just reasonably update them to use the new features as they are introduced.  If someone weightmaps "the Dork", adds JCMs, a skin shader...  

It would be really cool if the figures could be hosted like software distros.  Then we would have versioning (weightmapping, JCMS) and forks (re-maps, head swaps) and a person could see any changes or fixes made to a figure and always be able to easily find the most up to date package for each.  I think Smith Micro would be in the best position position to host and distribute that content of anyone.