Part of the issue may be that, IMO, not that many Poser users do animation. If you're used to doing stills, then the compromises needed to get the performance might indeed be viewed as a step backward.  

IIRC, DAZ has marketed games oriented stuff which I think incorporated decimating the figures to lower the polygon burden. I'd love to see an easy to use system that incorporated normal maps, ligh maps etc. to help with performance issues, even if the thing ended up using Poser 4 level figures.

Something like the Scratch interface (http://scratch.mit.edu) is probably much too simplistic, but it might be a beginner level interface that could get people interested. IMO, you have to have something that would be easy enough and produce reasonably satisfying results to get the ball rolling. I'm not sure that incorporating it into Poser would fly for various reasons e.g. cost, complecity etc. Having an easy way to export Poser content and have it consumed by a separate application might work. I havent really looked at any of the game creation apps or iClone to know if anything suitable exists. I say games but an easy to use, scriptable animation system in general would be appealing to me at least. It wouldn't have to be some nitro powered mega FPS marvel to begin with.

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