Maybe the question you guys should be asking yourselves is this: just what do you expect from a four hundred dollar program? If you want full photographic realism and perfect reflections and all these other toys, maybe Poser and Studio just arent for you anymore. Maybe it's time you moved on to the higher end programs where you can get all that and more — and at a price tag appropriate to the power you now seem to expect. 

These programs, by and large, are for hobbyists, overwhelmingly so. That doesnt mean development should end, but at the same time, what is the point of putting in these higher end resource hogs that only a few percentage points of the user market is even going to bother with?

Yes, development should continue. New features should be put in place. But sticking a Maseratti engine in a Prius? Dude, go buy a Maseratti. To be frank, you're just screwing it up for the rest of us.

What does the price have to do with anything?  Blender is free, as is Daz|Studio...  Carrara is in Poser's price range...  Is there some "quality cap" where $400 programs aren't supposed to get any better?  Where are the $600 or the $800 programs that improve on Poser?  Yes, it is a $400 program, but many of us have been paying the upgrade price for many years and have invested much more in Poser than a mere $400.  What does the upgrade price get us on top of what we already have is the real issue.  Is the addition of an open-source rendering engine available for free in blender going to be worth the $150 upgrade price to the next version?  There is nowhere to go for serious Poser users...  Hosting Poser scenes in other higher-end programs doesn't magically solve all of Poser's shortcomings. I don't know what high-end resource hogs you are talking about, but your argument could be applied to stopping Poser development altogether.  If it already does x% of what y% of people buy it to do...  Why add more to it at all?  Because they decided to make a "Pro" version and claimed it would integrate with professional pipelines and appeal to non-traditional users of Poser.  A feature that uses a lot of resources isn't necessarily a high end feature; ray-tracing is much more computationally intensive than scanline rendering, yet ray-tracers have always been a dime a dozen.  This insistence that Poser is a hobbyist program undermines SM's efforts to position Poser Pro as a professional tool.   

So, since I don't want to ruin anything for anyone, what features should SM be adding to their $400 program that wouldn't be wasted on us lowly hobbyists?  I'm really unclear on this.  I'd consider Cycles a higher-end renderer than Firefly, but in that it produces similar results in seemingly much less time I can't call it a resource hog or say that it's in any way an unwelcome addition.  I fully sympathize with those trying to decide whether its more important to maintain compatibility with existing content or to unleash the full power of Cycles to demonstrate its superiority over Firefly.