V4 will be used in Poser until a viable successor takes her place. However that new figure will have to be able to use her content as well. If a new figure comes along and cannot use peoples huge investments they have for V4, there is no chance it will take off and the adoption rate will be very slow. In Studio, V4 is practically dead because the users there prefer the Genesis platforms and have the ability to port all off her content (skins, morphs, clothes, hair etc) over to use with that. What does this mean? Their Genesis figure is now also V4 and better. They have their V4 replacement, Poser users are still waiting for theirs. Because V4 was unchallenged for so long, asking people to throw away years of content collections is a tall order to ask just to try something new. There has to be some form of backward compatibility to ease the transition onto this new figure. If not, well V4's reign in Poser shall continue as the no.1 used figure.

And this is what I mean by leaving the Poser 4 workflow behind. Regardless of which software one uses, everyone has the ability to to port all off her content (skins, morphs, clothes, hair etc) over to use with the figure of their choice.

BTW - how can Gen4 be considered dead in DS with all of the effort being put forth to get Gen4 content into the newer meshes in DS?