Support for a figure can be native or converted. 

There are now pretty good tools for converting clothing (wardrobe wizard, Xdresser) tools in Poser itself (fitting room, cloth room, magnets) and hair (HCS, own magnet setc). Poser comes with tools to tune the results (morph painter). Choice of tools for a job depends on model at hand, result required and time available. The algorithms used in these tools get better all the time and the growing computation power we all have at hand allows better conversions in acceptable time. 

Recent arrival on the conversion market is texture transformer. Technology appears to work for V4->Dawn conversions and conversion to Roxie and others is announced.

Universal poses have been around in Poser for a while, but the feature needs updating to allow for differences in hierarchy. Dawn is much more segmented than previous figures for example, and Roxie has bettern hand articulation. I expect someone will pick this up and make a PoseConverter that takes V4 poses and chews them into Dawn, Roxie, or whatever figure on demand poses using the features of the target figure in an intelligent way, distributing the bending over the added body parts and, who knows, making adjustments for the morphs that are set, so 'hand on hip' places hand closer to centre for further away depennding on the value of the 'skinny' and 'queen size butt' FBM.    

All this makes the support for a figure issue is less pressing or important than it was before.

First difficulty in conversion is the correct interpretation of the donor data. When the donor is standard, conversion is easier. V4 may have her problems as a figure, but at least she is a de-facto standard for supporting content and that is how I think she will stay with us for a long time and why it is still safe to invest in development of content for her. Maybe not to be ued in conjunction with the V4 figure itself, but converted to whatever figure is en vogue at the time. 

For successful development of new figures I think developers must focus on getting support of the conversion tools. 

This will hopefully open the market for native 'other' figures: Gnomes shaped, rigged and tuned to represent a gnome and not an ideal adult morphed and scaled to proportions of a gnome; old hags shaped, rigged and tuned to represent an old hag in all respects and not an ideal adult morphed to look like an old hag but bending with the skin flexibility of a teenager, and so on. 

Just my 5 cents.