I would agree with you Wolf that there hasn't been much development in Poser animation tools for a decade, but I am hard pressed to think of anyone who enjoys animating in DS (as opposed to say, using DS for character creation and then porting the figure elsewhere. That said, I am interested in exploring other options, and I would be interested to hear about your experience with the DS to iClone to Blender pipeline you're using. Pros, cons, costs, that sort of thing.

You mentioned "four options for audio based lipsynch". I wouldn't mind checking them out if you can name them for me. The only DS based one I've used so far only worked with the 32bit version of DS. The Facemojo system you mentioned looks really neat though, and I look forward to seeing more of it in action.

The strong do as they can while the weak do as they must.