I don't think Poser is dying and can be put somewhat simple i think, if it were the case that it were, the argument to support it when reading through the posts seems to be due to the genesis figures and there integration with Poser. If SM saw this as a problem and they should because it would be good for them to support them, but on the other hand, they could also just hire a very good character modeller to make a competing man and women and add it to Poser, then there wouldn't be much of a problem?

And its sad they don't because they keep including these very old characters in there releases and to be honest some of them are outdated, like the old animal characters etc.

But when that is said, I think the misplacement of whether poser is dying or not, comes when you say one software vs another, because most people that make CG use a large number of programs for different purposes. To me it would be equal to ask whether Daz is dying because now you have Zbrush and you can make any character in there you want and you could keep asking questions like that, but the fact is that these program serves different purposes. And in most cases you are better off using both of them if needed.

You will rarely in my opinion at least, see a very interesting image of just a good looking character posing for the camera, you need all the other stuff to make it worth looking at, to make viewers think, evoke emotions etc. You will of course see these character images but most of these that are interesting to look at, is because these are unique character created in Zbrush or something and the creator have made them interesting. But looking at image after of image of for instant Genesis characters is not very interesting i think.

One of the best things for SM to do for future Poser releases i think, would be to get it integrated with Vray, which are the most common used render in the industry as far as i know. They already have the amazing Powerfusion so if they could hook Poser up to Vray, it would be a huge improvement, the amount of free resources suddenly made available to Poser users would make it take a quantum leap and you would get Poser closer to a final stage of being completely integrated with the rest of the industry.

So don't think Poser is dying, but Poser on its own can not cut it and honestly not a lot of software packages can do that, even people using 3ds max will use, Zbrush, Photoshop and other after effect programs. People should be more concerned about what image they can get out in the end and less concerned about how and which software they use to get to that image .