Carrara 9 has to have dynamic cloth.  I just don't see any way around that.  If 9 comes out without dynamic cloth, well then what the heck is the major feature that justifies a whole point upgrade release?

I would like to see them fix the subsurface scattering to accept maps and allow for more human-skin like sss settings.  That ought to fit right in with Daz's wishes to make Carrara more content friendly.

In the same vein, they should also fix dynamic hair so it's not so light sensitive and works better in animations.  Again, this fits in with their thrust of making Carrara more content friendly.

Every upgrade so far (that I've been a carrarist, which is since 7) has included a render speed increase, that wouldn't go amiss.  I don't want them to mess up the renderer, but making it even faster would be a good thing.

Improve atmospherics and landscaping tools.  Make Carrara the Vue-nemesis it can be, and make it so that regular users not named Howie Farkes or Patrick Tuten can more easily put together excellent landscape scenes.

It's time to put all of the tools and features in Hexagon into Carrara. As I understand it, the two programs use the same coding so this shouldn't even be all that difficult.  Hex has some great tools, but crashes for me every 5 minutes.  Carrara never crashes on me (so far) when in the modeling room, but is missing some simple tools that would make life easier.

Fix blurry reflections so that they are a viable render option and don't take forever to render.  I don't understand why regular reflections get rendered lickity-split but blurred reflections take forever.

I'm trying to think what else there is to add but I'm blanking cause I'm a bit tired at the moment... 

I don't know what to expect though because it's odd that after the 8.5 development cycle took so tortuously long, that 9 it announced for first quarter of next year.  That seems like one of 3 options is going on:

1 - Daz has already done most of the development for 9, it just took them forever to make Carrara Genesis-friendly (sorta) and they held back all the rest of the 9 features/development they already did for the next major upgrade cycle.

2 - Daz is shifting gears and putting some real development muscle behind Carrara, and shifting away from endlessly upgrading their free Studio app.

3 - Carrara 9 isn't going to have much in the way of fixes and new features at all, but hey it will come with a shiny new Carrara 9! sticker we can put on our notebooks to show our fandom, and will only be a 'nominal' fee of $599.99   :)