Likewise I think the stiflingly conservative forum obsession with photorealism in poser is equally pointless.

I think the realism obsession started as an innocent way to fix the Poser5 quirks and bugs when it came out with Firefly. Realism was the primer to make the material room behave. To make lights that rendered what your preview was showing.. etc. It was really exciting here in 2003-5 for me anyway. face_off came out with real skin shader. bagginsbill applied real math to the art of Poser nodes to come up with vss and predictable results... stewer came in and gleaned usable data from all the experiments going on to use in the next release. This was the realism thing... Once you can get something that works (rules), you can do just about anything else.. within the limits of the software... this is how I take it anyway. Then there's making the little 250.00$ app do occationally incredible things, factor.  

Now, so many years later it may not make sense to the casual viewer. I totally get it. There is a backstory to it though.

You want photorealism in art, look at a photograph.

Sure,,, but in cgi you get to make everything in your viewport, if you want. How you want. As far as you want to go.. Get more interactive challenge and stimulate the brainwaves... and keeps naked men in raincoats off the streets.