I started using DS about 4 years ago, I own Poser 2014 Pro and Reality 4.0. I have been playing around with Iray since it became available and for my money, the product is every bit as stable as Reality, in fact I find DS with IRay easier to use and not very difficult to navigate. Granted, I purchased some of the commercial shaders at the start, simply to learn from, now I am quite comfortable adding the IRay nodes and setting up existing textures to work in IRay, it is really quite simple and no where near as time consuming as setting up textures in Reality. I am looking forward to seeing Paolo's version 4.5 with the 10 times render speeds and that may sway me back to using Reality, but for my time and money, Iray is a great middle ground. I agree that more specific technical documentation is required in order for everyone to fully understand all of the features of Iray and I look forward to seeing what is made available by DS.

This is neither condemnation nor defence of either side in this dispute! The people bashing programmers for being terrible document writers may have a point, in that, explaining the technical intricacies of how a piece of software works in terms that a user can understand is very difficult for most programmers to do. They do not think in user terms, they cannot dumb down their understanding or even verbalize things that they take for granted are already understood.

A truly brilliantly designed piece of software would require no documentation at all. The U.I. would guide the user to one and only correct method of accomplishing the software's intended function. Be careful what you wish for, in this utopian environment, there would be no room for innovation, creative thinking or experimentation.

IMHO