I think some of your points are good, but I don't agree with it being a problem with people clinging to V4 and Dawn, these just happens to be what, I at least, would call the native characters for Poser. But there are lots of characters even for these meshes, morphs etc. That can turn either of them into something that you wouldn't even be able to recognize as being either of them. In that regards there are no difference between characters whether that's a Genesis or not. Its just as easy to spot those, whenever very little have been done to change them. Which at least to me is no problem, designing or even morphing an existing character into something new is a huge task with textures and everything. Expecting the average Daz or Poser user to do this is a bit unrealistic. My guess is that a lot of people that have knowledge of other 3D programs, like Zbrush etc. Will often use either V4, Genesis or some other base mesh when designing new characters. This is obvious one of the benefits of having such knowledge, but again such things might not be to important to some people to do, maybe they don't have the time, some might be new etc. There can be a million reasons. Its no secret that some people are better than others, its just a fact, but no one started being a master artist, it takes a lot of practice.

I do agree with you however, that it seems that some might not really want to move on from Firefly, which I think is sad, as it truly have no future in Poser in my opinion, except maybe as a Preview render. It is going to be slaughtered by Superfly (PBR) unless SM for whatever reason are desperate in trying to keep it alive. The only useful thing about it, is that Poser can't export Superfly materials correctly so you can import them into other solutions like 3ds max, at least I haven't figured it out. But the moment that is possible, Firefly for me at least is officially dead, which I think is a good idea. There are simply to many benefits to PBR. Also you have to remember that there is basically no difference between Superfly and Iray in the sense of their purpose, both are PBR render engines, but there are differences in certain settings etc. But overall they are the same. So nothing prevent you from doing just as good renders in Superfly as in Iray. Now Poser lack some of the tools that you will find in Daz, such as bloom control, HDRI controls, better fog, dust, smoke control etc. But with a little knowledge of PS or Gimp you can easily add stuff like this and in most cases its most likely preferred anyway to reduce render times and add flexibility.

Im not sure if there exist a Superfly texture for V4? Adding that would bring V4 on track with Genesis in that department. Obviously you wont have the mesh details from Genesis, which is both good and bad depending on what you have to use your character for. But there is as far as I can see nothing that prevent someone from making a real PBR skin texture for V4 or Dawn.

In regards to poke-throughs, at least for me I only experience that with Conforming cloth. The moment you "pressure" poses, most conforming cloth simply give up, which is why I only use dynamic cloth. Where you will only in my experience have it where skin collide, such as backside of the leg if its bend, the armpits etc. Which is minor issues compared to dealing with conforming cloth poke throughs.

Also P11 you can copy morphs from the character to the cloth, which for the most part, if the cloth is made to deal with it, will for the most part work very well only with minor adjustments.

So at least to me, I think that the Poser and Daz workflow is slowly getting more advanced, the time where people just had to click "Conform to.." is not as easy with good results as people were used to, maybe because expectations have also gone up. So Firefly renders are not as impressive anymore and if you do PBR renders, you don't want some clunky cloth to ruin it etc.