The end user market is probably made mostly of people wanting the best results with the least effort.  A lot can go wrong over the course of an animation, and things that look good in preview may not look so good when rendered.  I imagine a lot of people try animation only to find the results often are not worth the time invested.  Game engines might not look as good as a typical firefly render, yet I can't help but see them as the future of animation on the desktop.

I think you're right. For animations, totally. I got half way through making a machinima music-video of Skyrim clips I'd coordinated before I kinda... (and this is sad)... ran out of hard drive. LOL.Even with having to go through a complex workflow and taking multiple "shots" of the same few seconds, AND having a very limited number of "poses" -- it was miles faster (and intuitively much easier) than anything I could have done with Poser. You can approach machinima pretty much exactly the way you would approach actual filming: with a script that hopefully the "actors" follow the way you expect them to and cameras that you control -- and you compile only the very best of the hundreds and hundreds of the individual clips you might save into a whole. None of this slaving over a simple walk cycle and having to make everything absolutely perfect because it's going to take you 3 months to render 1 minute of animation. 

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PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.