I agree that a figure should be "non-hideous" out of the box.  It shouldn't be a total shocker.  Whether a head is pretty or not is completely subjective though.

I'm confused about the base face being extremely important because it can be morphed, even if you have to go to the morph brush to do it.

At worst, I think you can say the Genesis faces are plain but I've seen some fantastic faces come out of them.

IMHO V4 looks "stern" out of the box but not hideous.  Roxie is plain but I think there is some cuteness in there.  Dawn has a long face and the jaw makes it semi-tricky to change because you have to be be careful to not morph too far away from the jaw "bone".  Alyson is one I didn't like at all out of the box, still morphable but I'd need a bake a new face into that mesh.

If you're going to just load and not shape the face at all and just maybe blink the eyes and smile, I guess the default look would be very important.  But if the morph packs are top-notch, you should be able to get different faces on a figure.  And that's not to attack what people look for, but if folks aren't going to adjust proportions and the mesh or morphs don't facilitate that, then they aren't going to be happy with the figure and it isn't going to be as versatile as it could have been.

In V4's defense we did not have the scaling features that worked on clothing when V4 came out, so you were really left with the base proportions and reliance on good morph packs for that.

These days, using a reasonably modern version of Poser, if good scaling is designed for the figure, it could be applied to clothes automatically and you can change whatever proportions you would like to.  That's one thing that would be (and should be) a step up.

It's too bad we didn't get an official V4.5 with weight-mapping, re-worked scaling, SSS and so on.  I am well aware of the WM variants but you need a single, official (or community adopted) version to have a foothold for it to be successful.

Any new figure, you need some good, solid reasons of what new you want to bring to the table, otherwise there's no point and it's just another figure, speaking of humans of course.  I can't short-change simply the desire to make something new too.  I think that's important.  You need cycles (which you might call reigns) to make it all work.  Nothing gets moved forward if you use one figure for the next 10 years without new versions bringing in new ideas and content.

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