In my opinion and as Drafter, said one of the huge let downs have been the characters that is supplied with Poser and if I were Smith micro I think I would change business strategy a little. Stop making so many different releases of Poser, like a Pro version etc. Make one version and sell it cheaper than it is now. Make sure that it releases with up to date characters, stop adding all those old Poser characters, but rather a few top characters/animals etc. They need to fix the face room again, the idea behind it was very cool. Add cameras that you can control in the viewpoint and same with lights (know you can do it already, but its not working very smooth i think). Make it possible to customize viewport navigation, so you can use the same controls as in other software for navigating the viewport, like 3ds max, maya etc. Improve the cloth rooms (wont go into details, but basically more options.) Update the material library with more Superfly shaders. Make the character pivot point easier to work with, so you faster can pose and move stuff around the viewport. Particle effect system is needed as well. Obviously they dont have to do all the stuff at once, but they should aim towards it.

Assuming they reduced the cost of Poser, what they should do instead, is selling high quality characters and animals that works well in Poser and are designed to work with the face room and so forth. I don't think its extremely bad that Poser is not on the front with all the newest features etc. Because as new features or more features are added it also requires a lot more from the users, which again might scare some people away that are using Poser because its fairly easy to use compared to other applications.

And as the OP mentioned about ManuelbastionIlab for blender, it looks cool, but at least from what I have seen its not mind blowing and looking at the workspace for setting it up, I doubt its anywhere as easy as in Poser. And not to have a bash at Blender as I really like the idea behind it being free. But after trying it and having to restart it 10-15 times in 20 minutes due to the user interface being the most weird user interface I have ever tried in a program. Im fairly sure that using Manuelbas.Ilab is not a walk in the park, if you dont already know blender :D (But have to say that I havent tried it so, Its just a guess and I might very well be wrong.)