Quote -   I do have much better hardware now, and even tried installing poser 7 on it, but the fact that it was single core meant that it still ran very slow. 

     Clarify;  your new hardware is single core, or are you under the impression that P7 renders single thread?  Look under edit:general preferences:render

     As I recall, P7 (and the original Poser Pro) was the first Poser version to render multi-thread, albeit it only divided the render frame into halves or quarters, as opposed to the P8+ system of distributing the render by buckets to whatever core next becomes available.

     Dynamic cloth excels at animation; you must have been doing something wrong.  Maybe we can figure out what.

     Walk cycles -and all other raw motion sequences- always need refinement, in my experience.

     As for render times, you need to develop a sense for balancing off render speed versus quality.  It is like bargaining for a purchase - you figure out how much render quality you can get for the amount of processor time you're willing to spend.  Of course, you could buy a dual-processor workstation;  Cwichura has dual HyperThreaded 10-core Xeon processors in his workstation;  that's forty rendering threads!  The current Poser will use every one of those threads;  sure is faster than single-threaded!

Poser 12, in feet.  

OSes:  Win7Prox64, Win7Ultx64

Silo Pro 2.5.6 64bit, Vue Infinite 2014.7, Genetica 4.0 Studio, UV Mapper Pro, UV Layout Pro, PhotoImpact X3, GIF Animator 5