"-- eventually, there won't be any entry-level jobs left (they will be replaced entirely by automation and the one or two mechanics/programmers/engineers/whar have you who supervise the machinery) "

That's a little bit out of the general DAZ discussion, but I agree with you there, it has been happening for quite a while.  While robots can replace assembly line workers, the can't replace white color jobs, but computers and AI in general has.  It used to take an army of accountants to run a good sized company's accounting department, now you can get a away with a hand full.  Same with the rest of the people that pretty much shuffled papers from one desk to another.  It's called "increased productivity" - basically doing more with less people.  In theory this frees them up to do other, less tedious jobs.  The new jobs however don't seem to be showing up.  There's a bit of political fervor over that these days...

Our socio-economic system seems to be out of whack with our technology, that's why the middle class is disappearing and all those billionaires are showing up instead.

Getting back to DAZ though, the fear seems to be where they are going to go in the future rather than what they are doing now.  As a long time DAZ customer, when they were annoying me was back around two years ago when they couldn't seem to find a direction - I was one of the people who paid for a full version of DS 4.0 before they turned around and made it free, and I had to suffer through the incredibly poor move to the new store after that (And kudo's to Rendo, their transition ran much smoother).

But DAZ has been in a place for a long time that everybody else is just getting to - you give away the software, you sell the services and support.  Obviously the development of that software has to be paid for, they are set up where that happens.  Smith Micro sells you the software, and is dependent on someone else to service it.

That model is starting to fail, even Microsoft figured that out. 

Personally I feel better about the future of working with DAZ products than I have in a while.  I don't see what they did with V7 as a move in the wrong direction, and the results of using G3 thus far have been pretty amazing.  Now bring on the males.