Having said that - my answer is Yes! Yes, some content creators are variously lazy and ignorant - take your pick. They either don't have the skills or the knowledge and fail to acquire either. I don't understand why I see these in the store. I won't name names, but some of them are famous. Conversely, some do take the lessons learned and trouble themselves to put a Fresnel_Blend into their shaders, or maybe to run EZSkin since Snarly and I both made all that tech free for commercial use - don't even mention us, you're welcome.

I don't think it serves any real purpose to ask the inferiors to stop, nor even to offer unsolicited advice.

Well, I don't think anyone should ask anyone producing anything for Poser to "stop." But, maybe asking them to "learn" might be better. And, there's something to be said for stewardship, of course. I don't care who it is, if they sell it, their name is on it, even if they didn't manufacture it.

But, not wishing to derail, but it's very pertinent to this question... (For those just waiting to flame up, I'm stating now I won't participate in any war.)

The only "content" producers are what you see in places like Renderosity's marketplace. Sure, there are a other places to go for content, like RDNA and, rarely, DAZ. There's Contentparadise, but, honestly, there's nothing there I'd want to buy, since it's mostly for native-content support products and a few other things.

The problem is that the only major producer of Poser products no longer produces them. (Barely) They were also one of a handful where comparative quality was fairly guaranteed. There are certainly vendors and some outfits that produce quality products, but now the lion's share of producing quality Poser content rests directly on their shoulders in a market that is under assault by a flood of inferior products. They can't keep up with the demand for quality products and, I'd imagine, their market is shrinking, bit by bit. Instead, lower quality products that don't make much use of anything past Poser 6 flood the shelves...

Effectively, what SM does is make a development platform and then tell its audience "Have at it!" The strategy is a good one, if you have a vibrant creator community. But, if you don't, and, instead, most of that community of creators don't touch your product's new features, and if you're not being a good steward at producing companion products that take advantage of it, every penny of development cost that went into that new feature is wasted. All of it. Well, most of it, at any rate, since the majority of the products that appear on the shelf which use your product don't use any of the new features and there is no way for your users to become familiar with them.
You mentioned that "Poser has had that for awhile" (Forget what it was, atm, not going to chance the post blowing up while I hunt for it) and then produced a render example. It's a feature that I guarantee you that some coder, somewhere, sweated over and got paid for and was proud to do it... that is wasted as any "value-added" component of Poser. It's all wasted because nobody is going to be making products that take advantage of it. They either don't know how or users have no idea it's even possible.

This business model, evolved in the days when content creation was generally handled in a much more professional manner and very good marketing and brand stewardship was free advertising for the platform, is no longer sustainable. (Well, if I was worried about it, the term I would use would be "coughing up blood.")

I want to see Poser 25. But, it is not going to happen unless an organized and knowledgeable team creates quality products that continue to take serious advantage of new product features and act as a continuing source of promotion for the platform.

You, and a handful of loyal veteran warriors, are the only ones who consistently inform and demonstrate features of each iteration of Poser that users wouldn't even know about, since nothing they have in their huge stable of content will take advantage of it. Part of this is due to legacy compatibility issues, but the major fault lies in the lack of quality content producers. Poser users would not need their legacy content if the shelves were full with products of like quality.

It's not a vendor-bashing statement. It's directed at the future of the Program when the vendors, who produce the driving content of the platform, are just no longer able to provide quality content that takes advantage of new features. IF the developer isn't going to do it, if vendors aren't going to do it, and if users can't do it, then a magic goat isn't going to appear and do it.

If I was SM, I'd be working on a team to push the envelope to produce the quality content necessary to act as a jump-starter for the marketplace and I'd run the marketing department over-time, every week, with content-promotion and content-creation partnerships with quality vendors who push the limits of new platform features. New features are great, but they're meaningless if there aren't any products that use them.

PS - Sorry for the lengthy post. I'm verbose, anyway, but I will be away-from-keyboard for quite awhile and wanted to get this out.