I don't think photorealism has anything to do with it. Not a thing. For what I can see, the people who strive for that seriously are generally technically minded enough to be making textures and modelling anyway.

When I say 'realistic', I mean: Not a toon.

The native Poser figures in my runtime are basically toons. Fine for some purposes, but not for most of my renders. A couple of badly supported exceptions exist. But since I'm not skilled enough to make them look any different from the defaults which everyone is using, I'll rarely render them.

Toon isn't automatically ugly. To me, what is ugly is a half-toon with a photographic texture and lovely SSS. It just screams all sorts of wrong to me. Oh well. I guess I'm the only one.

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PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.