Quote - The trouble being that I get the sense that Poserdom is moving in the GC direction.  How many updates before GC is the only option, with "normal" rendering removed, just as old P4 rendering was?  That may be the day when I walk away from Poser, or I may be forced to finally work with it.  Maybe.

Poser is dumbed down in so many ways, but here it tries to force people to do it the smart person way.

I'd say it would be best to work with it.  It was added for a reason, because too many things in Poser were dumbed down or hacked and it was ultimately holding everyone back.  When Pro was introduced you can see the trend of trying to do more things right rather than simply, and these changes really had to be made to both versions of Poser as they share content.  My experiences have shown that since GC was added everything I've made from scratch looks better.  Unfortunately that means all of my old stuff does look worse.  GC just requires a different set of assumptions about how things will ultimately look, but similar results seem possible.