I think you have some good points and suggestions that would be worth a look for SM to consider.

It would be nice with a more advance preview render that would allow for testing or specifying specific elements you would like to test, such as shadows, displacements etc. However Poser do have the ability to render out a PBR preview simply using low settings, the ability to area render at higher settings and so forth.

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With Poser's viewport, Firefly and Cycles interpreting the same materials so differently, it would be interesting to see how Poser's viewport could be modernized without breaking all existing materials.

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I don't think its possible to do this, taking into account that these render engines are completely different. I know I have said it before and that it tend to rub some people the wrong way, but there is no future in Firefly, for SM to spend resources on it would be a waste of time, it would require them to give it such an overhaul that they might as well spend the time implementing a new render engine instead. In my opinion they should rather spend their energy making Superfly faster, better lighting features, especially HDRI.

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Instead people still ask for better figures, replacements for V4 or Posette even.

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I think these should be kept separate from the features you refer to. Adding new high quality figures one or two each release would not interfere with the developments that you are referring to. And besides that, you have to ask yourself if such muscle/body feature would solve anything if they were applied to existing Poser figures? I doubt that. I do like the idea that you are talking about, but for this to work you need decent figures first. I can't help thinking about the facial features that they added to the new characters, where you could manipulate their faces in new and "smarter" way. Yet people did not really care, because the underlining figures were of such quality that it didn't matter. So don't get me wrong I would welcome the idea that you suggest, if you could apply it to existing figures at will like the Gs and Vs characters, but if you can't, new figures are needed first.

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But considering the aforementioned competition, is there a single thing Poser does better than all of them? I'm struggling to think of what it could possibly be.

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I don't really know if that's a relevant question, meaning it would be the same as asking is there anything that Maya does better than Max that would make you change from one to the other. I think you would find the answer to be almost purely what people prefer. And again can only stress that rarely only one program is used in any production, people use bit and pieces from several. Nothing prevent you from Posing in Poser and import the stuff into 3ds max or blender and continue working there, if you find some of their tools are working better for what you need.

I can only speak for my self since Poser is part of my workflow, that I use Poser because I think its faster to work in, the cloth room is easy to use and I haven't had that good experiences with Daz cloth features. Since I normally export everything to 3ds max anyway, its fairly few features that Im actually using that much. I do agree with you, that I would move more of my workflow to Poser were some of the features better. In fact I might move everything here, as I mostly use 3ds max, for rendering, hair, camera and lighting. Especially the last two, because I really don't like how these work in Poser. Since this is my workflow, the one feature that I personally would appreciate the most, would be for materials to be correctly imported into 3ds max, as this is currently what takes the most time for me.

So just to sum up, I don't really disagree with anything you are saying, but I think that they have to do it in the correct order, you can't keep adding advanced features when the basic of what people need is not working correctly. Meaning the characters in general, add those and then introduce what you suggested.