I'm just going to copy and paste what I wrote on the SM forums because it reflected how I felt about PE and SM before the announcement:

I'm glad to see you're still considering PE after your comics. At the same time I'm sad to see that it won't happen until after your comics, but if that's how you support yourself then that's what needs to be done.

PE is my go to figure in basically everything I do in Poser, nothing has been as versatile and easy to pose realistically as PE. The fact that there's only two pages of stuff for PE is killing me. Yeah it's all really top notch stuff, but LaFemme had double that the day she came out on the market.

Speaking of LaFemme, she's a great figure for sure and it's very easy to get great poses and renders with her but I just can't get her to look how I want and that's why I prefer PE's aesthetics and realistic proportions. PE is the every day woman while LF is the endurance athlete at the Olympics and for my purposes I don't need an elite athlete in 90% of my renders.

Even if you aren't working on PE atm, I would really love to see some more vendors putting out support for her that are more than clothes. Even if it's just fit morphs for already released hairs. I think the OOT hairs for LF look fantastic and I really wanted to use them on PE. I site mailed OOT on rendo asking if they would sell a fit morph for PE but they never responded. There's also the skins from 3Dream that really look amazing, I would love to see these for PE. Biscuits has some really nice face morphs and there were a number of great free face morphs released, but besides the one from Biscuits, there's no others on the market iirc. There's also the severe lack of shoes for PE on the visible marketplace, as with the face morphs, there are free ones but if you don't know where to look, you'll never find them.

As far as Poser, yeah it doesn't look great and even though they said they were possibly developing the next version, it's probably in development hell right now. The lack of any communication or updates or... anything is really telling that SM are not the company that should be handling Poser. I've been using Studio a bit more lately and getting better at the GUI and it's becoming much easier to get what I want out of it. The fact that Studio, iray, Cycles and everything else are continually getting updates while Poser is stagnant is pathetic. Poser's version of Cycles is a dead end that can't be updated, and while it was great when it was first released, they dug a ditch for themselves and now they're screwed.

I think I'm ranting a bit too much, so I'll just say that I'm glad you're doing ok and hope the best for ya and for the future of PE.

This news does change things, drastically! If there was hope for Poser becoming a relevant contender with all the latest features, this is it and with figures like PE and LF leading the charge I am really hopeful that Poser will start to see the increase in use it deserves.