Why get angry? You're preaching to the choir. I get you. Poser is better. I agree. But DAZ creates far better content. I would love it if the native content in Poser was equal. But it ain't. Not even close. Both are businesses. Both want and need profit. I get that too. Here's what I argue.... If SM/Poser included far better native content with the purchase of Poser, there'd be far less of a threat from third party content providers. Then again, if Poser included far better content with a Poser purchase, then it might make third party content creators not want to create content. It's a tough line to draw.

I love Poser. I love DAZ's characters. I love them both. I want both products and software to succeed. How do we make all this work? IDN. I really don't. What I do sense is that both companies need each other. And they seem to strive to make their products compatible. If SM/Poser gave us better content/characters, it would be an enhancement, not competition. We'd have more choices which would  be better. The community of users would have more to choose from. OK, fine. They my not choose V+ as often, but V+ would still be a very desirable and compelling option. As would whatever SM/Poser's native and far improved native character options would be. I love choices. I want more of them. That's why my wish list in Renderosity is so long. Give me choices. You won't die. You'll in fact thrive.

No one has ever bought Poser for the content (unless it's the new folks that are buying GameDev.)  Daz doesn't need Poser users anymore - they have gotten themselves a completely new customer base.  As far as the Poser userbase - we have options - keep using legacy figures whether it is DAZ figures or good ones, use figures that are designed to work with Poser 9+, force the genesis figures into Poser, or my favorite - all of the above.  Like you, I like choices.

What very few people here seem to grasp is that each company has a different business model.  DAZ is a content brokerage that dabbles (poorly) in software - they sell razor blades.  SM is a software house that dabbles (poorly) in content - they sell tool kits.  SM has been steadily adding features to the software that allow us to repurpose our content and retrofit new technology into legacy content, thus increasing the value of the content we already own (not to mention saving money for things that are more important than that 73rd version of a corset for Vicky - like the next version of Poser).  Of course, to take advantage of that, the enduser has to get out of the Poser 4 workflow, but once they do, well, the sky is the limit.

I gotta disagree with the "DAZ makes better content".  The quality of what is being made has been steadily going downhill over the past few years IMO.  I have content (mostly clothes) that were made a decade ago that are better that what is currently rolling out of DAZ today.  Have you noticed that most of the clothing content no longer has movement morphs?  Good lord, we had that back in the Gen 3 era.  Then there is the fact that there is less & less variety of clothing.  Victoria 3, Sydney & Miki have a wider variety of clothing than the DAZ Gen2 figures.

As far as figures, they have gotten less useful as well, especially from a TCO perspective.  From Gen 2 to Gen 4, all one needed was the base figure and the head & body morphs.  The cost of the figures as gone up by about 50%, because now we need the base figure, the ++ head & body morphs & then all of the additional "base" figures (at $30 - $45 apiece).  And they all have different UV maps, which means I can't move 1 skin texture from 1 figure to another.  And don't get me going on all of the Caucasianized non-white characters I.e. very few of the Asian (or any other characters) have black eyes, for instance - but almost all of them have blue eyes, WTF?).