At a guess, I would say Nerd is caught between what he wants to do, and what SM will allow him to do.

And what past experience tells him will and won't work.

Having a native version of Metaform would probably only be used by the animators at first. But considering what you can do with metablobs and shaders, it would greatly enhance the stills crowd work. Particularly since it could be written and multi-threaded from the get go. Any kind of fluid effect, and having responsive to the physics engine already in Poser? It's far easier to generate those at runtime than it is to add it in post.

A skin and muscle system would be wild...but would require carefully thought out panels for users, and getting some good figure builders to make the first iterations, and a good team who knows Poser and would be willing to spend the time to try and break it any way they can think of. The would also need to fix the IK solver for a more robust functionality (toggling and pinning at the least). Look at the number of figures we have that would benefit from weightmapping....and aside from a bare handful of projects, no one has bothered.

iClone Pro is a neat substitute for Motion Builder, and good for machinima. However, it kinda lacks the ease of speaking with other programs that Poser has, unless you pony up for the 3DXchange part of the system, which can push you up into the 4 digit realm that Vue Infinite occupies. It lacks the kinds of flexibility that Poser has overall. The ecosystem is nowhere near as deep and rich, either, atm.