If anyone who designs figures is reading this thread, the two most important comments besides "investment" are:

If you want me to adopt your new figure, then you have to show me something it does that V4 can't do. And that something needs to be something that makes me stop and go, "Wow! I need that in my runtime right now!!" 

and

when a figure comes out it takes years to get a good collection and quality stuff 

are the two outstanding comments IMO.

I remember when V4 came out and the majority of content was for V3, there was a fair amount of trepidation about fence sitting. What cemented V4 as a character was DAZ doing two things:

1. making the Windows XP of figures (not too powerful but reliable and not requiring a lot of horsepower, and not causing future incompatibilities)
2. refusing to make any future Poser-native figures to compete with her

If they had gone one more generation and made a V5 in 2006, I'm about 99.9% certain she would be the watershed pre-Genesis figure by now with a comparable amount of content. DAZ had a need to make DS when Poser 5 looked to be the final version, but dropping support for producing any further Poser native figures was a choice.