Hi TrekkieGirl - long time, no see. Glad you are back.

We had a survey thread here last month - turns out that almost all (over 92%) Poser users here are using Poser 9+ or later (38%+ on Poser 11 or Pro 11 alone). It's a pity that the same can't be said of vendors - most seem to be hell bent on staying with Poser 7 - I actually had a vendor tell me that they didn't have time to learn the features of Poser 9, while working on a product for Dawn - a figure that needs Poser 9 or later.

V4/M4 is the lingua franca of the Poserverse. A better question would be - do people still use a Poser 4 workflow, or have they joined the 21st Century? Vendors don't know when I buy a V4 outfit if it will ever be worn by V4, and I have many that haven't. It doesn't actually take much work (5 minutes or so) to refit a V4/M4 outfit to any other figure. Poser has a wide variety of methods, depending on which version of Poser they are using (Fitting Room, Wardrobe Wizard, or Xdresser).

Another thing to consider is how V4 (or any other figure) is used - If the user is running a WM and/or subdivided version of a legacy figure (which can be done in just a couple of minutes) - they have the same bending capability of a modern figure (Daz or otherwise), so it simply boils down to personal preference and content purchased. Problematic legacy figures are no longer problems when using a modern version of Poser.

A major factor I consider when purchasing content is how much work I need to do to convert a product made to Poser 4/7 standards to use in Poser 11. Example - if the vendor is too lazy to create material .mc6 files (a requirement for selling here that isn't enforced), that product needs to be at least 50% off before I would even look at it, much less buy it. I would say that it is costing them sales. Except for shoes - that is the one place that conversion isn't quite there yet.

In my case, I use every figure I have. I like variety, and limiting myself to 1 mesh is too limiting. It's been my observation over the years that most vendors characters look like siblings - buy 1 or 2 from each, and you pretty much have every character they ever make. I get around this by using many meshes. Most newer meshes only have a dozen or so vendors making content for them, which is another limiting factor.

OTOH, V4/M4 have several orders of magnitude of content available to them than newer figures - thousands of outfits in the case of V4 vs dozens for any figure NOT named V4 (that includes the g figures, btw); hundreds of outfits for M4 vs a dozen or so for any male figure NOT named M4.

With my Star Trek (TOS) comic I am working on, my main (humanoid) figures are the SM characters (P6 and up - I have more figures for them than were ever made for the newer figures). I also like normal sized people. - It doesn't matter if they are Dawn, Kez, Pauline, etc; everybody is wearing V4 Courageous/M4 Valiant outfits, with TOS textures - heavily modified by me.

I don't use DSON - it's more trouble than it is worth. It's (much) easier to export out a g figure as a Poser native figure and swap DS WM for Poser's WM (5 minute process, if you set up your DS content rationally. I exported the genesis 1 figure for use for aliens (genesis 1 & DarioFish's aliens rock!) and the genesis 2 series for "red shirts". You can actually end up with a nice, light weight (80Mb) figure - not much native content of course, but I'm the very model of a modern Poser user - easy fix. At 70% off MSRP, they are worth fooling with (if it isn't on sale in Fast Grab, wait a week or two, it will be) - otherwise, it's a TCO fail - especially the "iconic shapes" - they are made for people that can't do math.