From an outsider point of view:

Even in DS-land the use of Vicky 4 is still very strong. The reason why is very simple, and can be summed up in one word: Stuff.

Okay, three words: Sh!tloads of stuff.

Vicky 4 came out in 2005, if I remember right - the same time I was working for the fine folks in Draper, Utah. DAZ didn't come out with the next iteration (Genesis) until 2012. That's seven years of domination, and damned near 15 years of total existence. Metric megatons of stuff was made for V4 over these years, and still gets made: clothing, poses, morphs, textures, etc etc etc etc.

Now if Genesis (G1-G8) was directly translatable to Poser, I suspect Genesis 8 would be the dominant figure in Poserland today. But... it's not. So, for folks who use just Poser, or who straddle the two applications, Vicky 4 is still the perfect figure to use. It's pretty much still the penultimate of Poser-rigged meshes to this day. Unlike anything that's come out before or since, you can turn it into pretty much anything, and most people have.

Wanna slay Vicky 4? Here's what that hypothetical new figure has to do:

• be morphable to the point where morphs can be made to make it unrecognizable to the original VickyKiller figure. Almost all of the newer meshes fail miserably in this department.

• have a means to transfer existing Vicky 4 morphs, poses, and UV Mapping to VickyKiller, seamlessly.

• have a means to convert all the V4 poses so VickyKiller can use them.

• have a means to convert V4 clothing so that VickyKiller can wear them as perfectly as possible. Oh, and those dynamic clothing morphs had better survive the transition as well.

• while not as vital because workarounds are fairly easy, the hair has to fit as well.

• any scripts or addons to accomplish any of this has to be Poser-native, or it had better have a working application/utility for current (and three-versions back) OS versions for both Windows and MacOS. No half-assing it here with an external app which works only in one OS.

...that's a pretty tall order, innit? And yet Genesis 1/2/3/8 had to go through the same process (usually achieved by way of scripts and addon packages), which is why I have Genesis 8 figures that are exact analogues, right down to the same morphs and textures, as the Vicky 4 versions I built 10+ years ago. Standing side-by side in the exact same converted V4 pose, you'd never be able to tell them apart post-render, save for the fact that I converted the textures to iRay on the G8 figure.

So why bother? Because doing all that up there solves a lot of problems for you. It provides you with a very massive catalog of usable stuff for your figure, that a lot of your potential buyers already have. It gives you the flexibility that users crave. If SM were to expand their API and Python libs a bit (if they hadn't already), it would open up work for those folks enterprising enough to make these addons and conversion scripts for you... in a common frickin' language, no less.

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Anyrate, that's my $.02 - and I firmly believe that unless/until those conditions are satisfied, in a way that isn't a burden to the users, with the widest accessibility... things might get ugly for Poser.

Think you can do it? I hope for your sake that you can, and soon.

I say this because one fine day, profits from the sale of Vicky 4 stuff are going to slow to a trickle on their site, and DAZ is going to start wondering why they're still carrying around a nearly 15-year-old base mesh. Could happen this year, could happen 5 years from now... nobody knows except for DAZ' accountants... and because of near-eternal 100+ year copyright laws, once they pull it, it'll be gone for good (legally). Once it's gone, and with no viable replacement, I trust that I don't have to tell you what happens for Poser itself. If I were Smith Micro, I'd get cracking on satisfying that list of Things To Do up there... ASAP.

In the meanwhile, you still got breathing room, but I have no idea for how much longer.