I'm trying to give a practical suggestion , not an ideological.

I don't care what brand something is or if it's proprietary or not, as long as it works and I have full control.

Professional CGI Studios will never use "Poser" characters because they don't need a character that can withstand the abuse of hobbyist users and can morph into a gazillion of shapes with a mouseclick.

And they want proprietary figures because they want to build a brand that can be copyrighted for marketing.

So the idea of an "universal" figure makes no sense.

BTW, Genesis 1and 2 are also "just text files" once exported as objects. So are their morphs. All the "tech" is built right into Poser already. The DSON-importer just translates the DSON files into something Poser can understand.

Save Genesis as a cr2 and it'll still functions. (Maybe not as good as Genesis in Studio, but still much better than anything  else.)

 

Anyway, if someone builds a mesh that is as anatomical correct as Genesis II, provides some morphs and expressions that are as good or superior to Genesis', writes a texture convertor and also builds some (high quality) basic content, and then makes it all open source, I'll happily use that mesh then and ditch Genesis from my runtime.

But until this happens, I have way better things to do with my time than bthering whether a mesh is proprietary or not or holding a grudge because of a buisiness decision that was made in the past.

(To be frank, Poser (and it's users) got what they deserved when DAZ kicked them out of the party. I told them exactly this would be happening long before it actually happened, but everybody was just too busy playing with V4's knickers.)

I'm 48, and after 13 years of working my ass off creating better figures, I'm done with promises and big plans.

Genesis is happening right now  and it's the most realistic, most perfect Poser figure I've ever seen.

I'd rather wish Poser had it's "own" set of high quality figures, but unless we find an angel investor willing to dump a couple 100.000 $ into such an endavour, I don't see any viable alternative.