Your points are well-taken Nasultani. Smith-Micro is probably the best choice as a potential Carrara acquiror. My only reservation is that I am not sure how well Poser and Carrara can co-exist within the same company, competing for the same mostly US/European market.

For this reason I picked E-Frontier, because Shade is mostly active in the Japanese market.

Regardless, one thing is certain, and it's that Daz is not qualified for any high-caliber software development project.

It is not a question of Daz being understaffed, it's a question of Daz living in a planet of its own.

As evidence to my claim, I would like to 'call to the witness stand' the totally nonsensical fast mipmap texture filtering mode that Daz spent months to incorporate into Carrara 8.5

Fast mipmap is a form of glorified LOD that used to belong in last century's game engines, not in today's pro level 3D app.

In the process, Daz beautifully missed this technology, called Embree by Intel:

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/embree-photo-realistic-ray-tracing-kernels

Embree is already implemented in C4D R15 and VRay. Its implementation in Carrara would most likely not have taken more time or more skills than implementing fast mipmap

This is what Mark Bremmer had to say in this thread regarding Embree:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2872177

"C4D r15 has engaged Embree and it has made a huge difference in my render times. It would  be nice if Daz followed suit. "

Making huge differences in C4D's already super-fast native renderer means making phenomenal differences in the speed of Carrara's ailing renderer, while at the same time improving its render quality by a huge factor.

I would truly expect Daz Carrara's project manager to come here and give an explanation as to why preference was given to fast mipmap over Embree. I would really like to hear what he/she has to say.