Firefly and shadernodes are fine. even now theyre not even being used to 1/4 their potential by everyone but a small handful of devoted shader-gurus. more accurate rendering, or renderer improvements, would be a waste of dev 'focus' at this time when there are far more pressing issues to address. right now there are 3rd party renderers out there as options for the handful of people who are limited by the constraints of the firefly renderer.

the main problem that is holding back poser progress right now is clothing. the entire clothing system in poser is halfass bullshit. conforming is a fluke that was discovered by accident. all CR2 editing is a HACK. you basically have very patient content creators hunched over their comps editing text files and creating 50 JCMs in a piece of clothing just to have the end result still look nothing like what real clothing should look like.  open your eyes to the fact that every single clothing utility and technique out there is nothing but an elaborate workaround/hack to a fundamentally flawed clothing system in Poser.

Poser progress itself is held back because any time someone releases a new figure, the moment the poser community realizes that it cannot easily use the tens of gigs of legacy V4 content that they are all tethered to they abandon it and go back to vicky.

the cloth room as it is is not the solution. the vast majority of the poser market are hobbyists and casual users that wont devote weeks to learning the ins and outs of a cloth room, nor should people be forced to set up and run 30 frame 'simulations' just to get clothing to fit a pose.

this is how clothing SHOULD work in Poser:

1. you load your base figure

2. you load your clothing item. if it has a fit for the base figure, great. if not you can use the morphing tool right inside poser to quickly morph it closer.

3. you select the clothing and hit a big user friendly 'Cloth' button. a prompt pops up and asks you to select the target figure, you select Figure 1.

4. from this point on the clothing follows the movement of the target figure. pokethrough is handled automatically with collision detection.

this is all that a basic user should need to do to get a figure clothed.  ADVANCED users/vendors can then further customize and tweak the dynamic properties of the clothing to improve it, and share these tweaks/settings in some distributable format.

this is what Poser NEEDS for progress to continue. people who lose sight of what Poser is made for will ask for things like 'accurate caustics' in Firefly, 'particle generation' or some such silly thing.  Poser is designed for figure posing/animation and the fact is that its 2013 and there are several things that have not changed or improved in over a dozen years: Poser clothing is still a hack that results in substandard results, and we are still using transmapped hair that requires massive postwork and doesnt even look remotely real.

do a Google search for 'Nvidia Hair Demo'. look at the screencaps. look at the videos. that has been possible in realtime on Nvidia cards at >30-60 frames per second since 2009. i would give my left nut for hair like that in Poser, even if it takes me 60 minutes to render just ONE FRAME. transmapped hair is another joke that should have been abandoned long ago, but the hair room is again a mess - even experienced users devoting months to learn it are getting less than impressive results with it. it needs to be overhauled and made much more streamlined and user friendly.

3/4 of the hair on the market right now looks no better than Kozaburo's freebie hairs from 2000.  now i dont mean to insult hair modelers - they are doing their best with what they have. NOONE except game modelers limited by low-poly constraints use transmapped hair anymore -- yet here we are trying to create cinematic quality stills with it.