Honestly a lot of that sounds like not enough time was made for putting in enough effort to make thigs work right . It might be a hobbyist program but it's one that you have to be super dedicated to to get good results a lot of the time. A computer that wasn't up to the challenge of meeting Posers requirments won't give you a good experience and probably explains the technical issues you were having, though there is no "Actors" tab in Poser 7, at least not that I remember, but yeah I do agree that things like hair and textures should all be in the same place.

Animations can work just fine, if you don't put time and effort into it sure it will look like crap but that can be applied to anything in life. Though it can be time consuming it animations can look great in Poser.

Rendering speed in PP2014 is about 35% faster in complicated scenes in my experience and about 60% faster is super simple scenes even with IDL enabled, but that depends entirely on your hardware. What's rendering fast for me may render very slow for you.