_ " Do enough Poser users exist to support the need for another site/marketplace to take over for RDNA on the Poser side, since RDNA is seemingly phasing out their support of Poser with this merger?" _

Not likely; Smith Design has dropped the ball both technically and in marketing. The price of admission to Daz is "free". That's a good price, and the provide at this point a superior product.

I use Poser at this point only because I have used Poser for so long, and there are old scenes and resources that are in Poser format. That's a legacy market; legacy markets can be milked but don't warrant new investment.

_ " Is this community ready for an entirely different approach to managing figure creation that could solve Poser’s need for a truly modern figure pair?"_

Me, yes, but its not Poser or Daz; neither of which are up to the technical standards of Lightwave -- even Lightwave of years ago. More advanced applications long ago moved to lighter geometries, subdivision surfaces and a host of other "innovations" still unseen in Daz and Poser-verse.

Take instancing. Lots of folks are doing fantasy scenes . . . instancing technology has been around for years in applications like Lightwave -- and spectacularly in Eon's Vue products.

Still no instancing in Daz or Poser, so you're left with one shots and two shots. Look at the Poser galleries-- have you seen an army of Orcs?

So I think there's a place for a competitor to Daz; they've demonstrated that there's real money in selling content . . . and they are improving their technology.

But there's time for a competitor coming "from above" -- my pick would be Lightwave, but obviously Autodesk could do it, and has much more financial resources. Less obvious but possible players would be Eon (which seems to be heading in a different direction following purchase by Bentley), some bolt on to Blender (tricky because of open source issues with for profit material), Modo (pointing at a different market these days, but always had a keen marketing and community sense).