"Speaking of Marvelous Designer, I got a personal license for that awhile back and thought hard about upgrading to a commercial license (making clothes with that program is fun and easy) -- but I found I had to retopologize everything I made.  And if I retopologized, I'd end up basically re-modeling the piece, so I decided to just model from scratch to start with.
To each her own.  :-)"

Sure but it is fun to argue for your cause.

"..just model from scratch" doesn't take into account that ideas don't come from air. For example at Google, when they do an app, first they make it in Python, then they rewrite a second time in Python, and then finally the last time in C. You don't think the third version has much in common with the first version do you?

With Marvelous Designer you get the first version free.

That what is most difficult in 3D is neither modeling nor texturing but to come up with an idea. To help with that you need an environment that allows you to try out as many ideas as possible in as short time as possible. In Marvelous Designer you can try 20 ideas in the same time as 1 in your modeler.

ZBrush is an essential tool which I would claim you can not do without. In ZBrush you can do retop automatically. But if you do 70-80% automatically and the rest manually you get a mesh superior to anything box modelling can give you. At the time Jan19 tried out Marvelous Designer the retop was not yet there in ZBrush.

Finally you can do drapes in Poser but at the end of the cycle. With MD you start with the drapes, that is a big difference.