Quote - Does she have Tris?  yes she does... nobody has actually been able to demonstrate to me whay thats bad.  I cant tell you how much time I've wasted trying to get rid of tris in my models for no discernible purpose other than the oft repeated dogma"tris are bad mmkay". 

I can tell you exactly why.  Its called "pinching".  Pinching are unexpected creases in the surface.  They can be caused during subdivision because a tri in a loop of quads causes the quads to sudivide unevenly or incorrectly.  The tri may not subdivide at all (they often don't), creating a larger flat area among now smaller quads which smooth more evenly.  This results in a distortion of the surface.  It can also create problems with morphs.  If we were dealing with 3D modelling it can create additional problems involving subdivision and mesh editing because tris force a change in the direction of the topology that may not be desireable, as well as messing up subdivision.  Generally you want a mesh to be either all tri's or all quads so that things deform and subdivide evenly and without unexpected distortions.  Quads are currently prefered because they make controling the direction of flow in the topology easier to control and they also subdivide evenly and regularly.

I stated previously that it will be interesting to see whether this causes a problem in Poser.  If we were dealing with 3DS Max or Blender or any other professional modeling app, I'd say definitely it would.  But, as I do not have a current version of Poser (I have P6 for now which does not have the subdivision feature) I'm not sure exactly how Poser's subdivision works.  It may not even be true subdivision (I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't).  It may not present a problem for Poser, I can't be certain which is why I said I'm suspicious of it.

Its interesting to note for example that the older Jessi character from P6 has nearly as many tris at just over 1500 in her HiRes mesh.  Jessi also had a higher poly count than even V4 at just over 111,000 polys IIRC.  You see tris in similar locations on Jessi as on Dawn which makes me wonder if both meshes were made by the same person.  The Vicky 4 mesh, conversely, has a very different topology than either Jessi or Dawn.  Anyway, point is, with V4 you can pull her into a professional app like 3DS or Blender or Maya and still use her without issues (I have exported V4 with rigging intact and used her in Blender for example).  You can also use V4 to make morphs, again without issues.  I can even use Blender's subsurf modifier to simulate what using Poser's subdivision might look like as a way of previewing how a morph would look in Poser without having to export and interrupt my workflow.  With Dawn, there would be issues created by those tri's because they cause problems in subdivision and subsurf.  Since I can't alter the mesh to correct such problems, that means working around any problems they cause which could potentially make Dawn more difficult to work with.

A specific example, her nipple.  I'll use this as an example because if you look at the mesh the two odd tri's are easy to spot.  If you were deform that mesh, particularly in extreme deforms, you might well get a problem because while every other part of the nipple is a quad, you have two odd tri's that will inevitably create a different surface topology.  The more extreme the defomration the more visible that will become.  Now look at her arms, you have quite a lot of tris there, what happens if you give her bulging biceps?  What if you turn her into She-Hulk.. will those tri's be noticeable?  And to be honest I haven't tried and can't say for certain without trying it.  I hope it won't be a problem, but potentially it could be.  If it was all quads, you wouldn't have to worry about it.

And that's the issue with tri's in a mostly quad mesh in a nutshell.

Quote - Is it just sour grapes?  honestly what do people actually expect to see in order to say something nice?   Are only products aimed at a tiny niche of the market and made by a lone starving artist worthy of a nice comment?

Not sour grapes at all in my case, I'm just making honest observations.  Does someone have to be nice and applaud just because somebody makes something new?  Personally, if it were me I'd rather have the honest feedback so I know both what I'm getting right and what I'm getting wrong (the later so I can fix it).  So far as what I expect to see, I think I made that clear earlier.

I would have liked to seen Dawn backwards compatible to Poser 6.  With all the hype and talk about a new figure that was useable by both Poser and DS users... I'd like to have seen one that actually was useable by all of us.  Someone made the comment that because Dawn was weight mapped you couldn't use her in P6... why not?   Dawn herself does load in P6, the arms bend, she can be manually posed and that seems to all work okay.  Its not til I try to inject her morphs which require the PMD file that she breaks.  Can someone explain why that PMD is necessary, why could her morphs not be injected the same as every other figure I have?

I would have liked a mesh that was all quads.  Frankly I would have liked one that was about 80,000 poly's which would have been really nice to work with for all kinds of morphs.  As it is, I suspect Dawn will never have the range of morphs that V4 has because there just aren't enough poly's there.

Dawn does have her good points.  The additional bones will make her more bendable.  Dividing the chest and abdomen into two parts each was a good idea and will better simulate how the torso really bends (someone already commented they easily got her to do a back bend, not surprised by that at all).  Her freakishly large eyelash planes will allow some creative options with lashes (and I just saw someone has already taken advantage of that over at YURDigital).  I thought how they did a few of the joints was a little odd, but not being able to really use her in Poser 6 its hard to have an informed opinion about it.

But for me personally, Dawn doesn't offer me anything over Vicky 4 that would make the transition worthwhile.  Not the least because for the time being I'm stuck with Poser 6 and cannot presently afford to upgrade and so can't really use Dawn (that will pretty much take the steam out of your enthusiasm).  Whether its HiveWire, Daz or SmithMicro, all of them would do well to remember the world is currently crawling out of a bad recession that hit a lot of people hard.  Lot of people can't afford to upgrade software, or replace a figure they may have already sunk hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars into with something new.