"I gotta disagree with the "DAZ makes better content"

Maybe I should have phrased that a bit differently. I should have said "characters" instead. As for the clothing/hair/accessories available in DAZ's marketplace, most of that seems to have been created for the various V + M generations by third party venders. My own experience with that stuff is, especially with Genesis 2 characters, the aftermarket clothing seems to conform quite nicely between the various DAZ characters and I've also noticed that now many of those items are V+M4 as well as Genesis 2 compatible.

As I said previously, I got into this kind of out of curiosity and my use of both the software and the content is merely as a dilettante so my experience is probably not as extensive as most of the other posters here. I think I downloaded a trial version of Poser after stumbling across it and just wanted to know what it was. Jessie was the first character I ever tried to pose and that was only because it was included with Poser and I'd never heard of DAZ or it's stable of characters so my experience using this content probably isn't as extensive as most of the other posters here. But from my own experience use DAZ's characters from V3 through Genesis 2 is that compatibility and conformity props, hair and clothing has gotten far easier and better.

I seldom use Studio but when I do, I find myself craving the user interface of Poser and since I routinely bypass Poser's rendering engine for LuxRender, whether or not Studio's rendering engine is better or worse or just different really isn't an issue for me. But it's easy to understand why DAZ figures might render better in Studio. After all, why wouldn't DAZ make a rendering engine dialed in for their characters? They'd be crazy not to.

Maybe what we're seeing in the relationship between SM/Poser and DAZ 3D is a little like what happened a couple of guys named Gates and Allen realized that selling the software to run personal computers was going to be a lot more profitable that make and selling the hardware. DAZ is a little like Microsoft in that regard altho I'd argue their products relatively speaking are much better than Microsoft's (I'm a Mac guy through and through but let's not get started on that). Poser is the IBM equivalent - still in business and still profitable, still in the Fortune 500 but long ago bypassed by Microsoft in total value et al.