////////////////// The replacement of development teams has predictably slowed down releases (which is not the same as development), and the communication about what is being done has been less open than before. Understandable, too, as replacing a development team takes a lot of work that is rather uninteresting to the outside world. Work on Poser 11 has continued, with various updates and fixes along the way.

SM is requesting users share their wishes and feature requests on their own forums. You can pin-point a few common threads in these responses, but obviously a program will never be everything to everyone and choices will be made. Which those are remains largely unknown, but I'm sure the users aren't the only ones who can pin-point where Poser could do with (substantial) updates.

At the end of the day, Poser is a tool. What comes out of it has a lot to do with what the users can do with it. Photographers can make fantastic images on an iPhone, while tourists can make terrible snapshots on a Nikon D610. What SM can try to do is make SM easier to use, but that's still no guarantee. The internet is full of people who manage to turn a pre-made 3D model, pre-made materials, and pre-made HDR lightning set-up into a dreadful image.

I just don't get this myopic focus on characters as somehow the One True Yardstick by which all software should be measured. It may be different if you're in the business of creating content for characters, or if you're in the business of making tons of nude renders. Environment and prop wise there also hasn't been anything I haven't been able to use in Poser. If anything, the success of Iray in other software has made it easier, as the PBR textures can easily be plugged into Poser and work wonderfully with Superfly. //////////////////

The characters is one of the main features of the program and what it is designed for, its what makes Poser and Daz3D for that matter what they are. Its no different than people really into writing programs are interested in features that improve on that.

If you go and look at Poser 11, lets say you wanted to buy it, this is the first thing you will see:

If they want to sell Poser with such description, I think it would be wise of them to sell it with good characters, I would even go as far as to say that it would be natural to do so. Obviously this is just a part of the program and sure you can use external characters and so forth and most people do, but I personally think its a key feature of Poser as much as being able to change font in a writing program.

Its no different whether you make content or not, having access to up to date characters is the main reason people use these programs, just try to imagine if Poser 4 character were still the only characters available for both Poser and Daz3d today, I would highly doubt that these programs would exist. So I see no reason why anyone should not expect new characters and assume that most people expect a new Victoria or similar at some point.

And you are right that Poser is just a tool and you can make good and bad things with it, but not everyone are professional CG artists and might not care to much about having to spend a lot of time learning to do all these things, but merely want to make some images that they like or enjoy making, but again what will people do if they have no access to decent content?, they would stop using these programs. And characters are simply a huge part when it comes to content. But besides that, even if people purely made bad stuff, Poser as tool should thrive towards being as good as it can despite how their users use it or how good they are. Because they will reach a larger number of users with different needs. I don't really think its that relevant to take the users skill level into a account, when talking about Poser development. Because they should focus on the key features of Poser and that doesn't really have a lot to do with how skilled a person is I think, because the professional user, might only use a very small part of Poser as they use other software solutions as well. And my guess is that its primarily the characters, that they can Pose, quickly dress and manipulate, export them to Zbrush to customize them. Before they export them to other software solutions where they do lighting, rendering, Post etc. Keep in mind that most 3d programs handles static objects very well. So Poser might be good for them to quickly build a scene with static objects and with the characters in them, but nothing that you wouldn't be able to do in an external program with ease, the character are the most complicated elements.

But a user not that skilled, will most likely do everything in Poser, so for them characters and how they look and work might be even more important where as the professional might be more interested in how good they are to manipulate as they change them anyway.

So focusing on character in Poser makes good sense I think.