Well, I'm one of those who moved from Poser to Vue as well. I've been using Poser since version 2 up to Poser Pro 2012. Haven't upgraded to the latest version and I've skipped Poser 4 Pro Pack and Poser 7. Why move to Vue now after all these years?

I wanted to do landscape and nature scenes, but be able to incorporate all of my poser items into it and also be able to still do figure renders and indoor stuff. Poser has a few landscape and nature solutions, but if you're aiming at realistic outdoor and large scale landscapes, you soon hit the ceiling with Poser. It wasn't made for that. Considered a number of options, Bryce, Carrara, Blender, Terragen and Vue.

Bryce and Carrara have a reasonable poser workflow, but are outdated, after trying them for a while you notice that DAZ hasn't been able to bring them out of the last decade, Their age is showing.

Tried Blender, lot's of power, weak on the landscape side of course, I'm not convinced by the poser-blender workflow at all and blender manages to do everything in an akward way. It can do everything the others can, but why does it need to be in such a different and often not logic way? So, not for me, to different from what I'm used to and too many hours needed to even figure out how it works.

Terragen, very cool, not too strong on figure renders and poser workflow.

Last candidate is Vue. Excellent poser-vue workflow. The best in landscapes/outdoor, but good for indoor as well and even my first figure tries were satisfactory. There is a learning curve, but compared to blender it's little :) The rendering engine harnasses a lot of power and sure isn't a toy or outdated. As mentioned, the backdraft of Vue are it's memory and cpu hunger, although I've found that with my 16Gb RAm it is very workable. Had 8Gb before that was too little. Rendering times can be shocking though, they sure are longer then in Poser, but even that depends on what you do and do not use.

With Vue I do recommend some training though to get a better start. www.geekatplay.com offers a lof of good ones for free.

When it comes to realism and figures, I'm still learning. I do manage to create some very realistic landscapes with Vue by now. I've seen people do very convincing figure renders, but not that many. This may be a challenge to get with Vue and I haven't found much tutorials for that. It's one thing to see someone else do it, it's a whole different thing to manage to do it yourself.

The I've noticed the same goes for Octane or Reality in conjunction with Poser. I've seen some very realistic renders, but most aren't. So whatever you choose, it will be a challenge to get the hyper realism you're after :)

Artwork and 3DToons items, create the perfect place for you toon and other figures!

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?vendor=23722

Due to the childish TOS changes, I'm not allowed to link to my other products outside of Rendo anymore :(

Food for thought.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYZw0dfLmLk