I go back further than V4 - I am still buying 2nd & 3rd gen Daz stuff, as well as legacy Poser stuff.  You have to do this, if you want a wide variety of characters. Pick any particular character vendor; for the most part, all of their characters look like they are closely related.  By using different base meshes, you avoid that.  Added bonus, Poser allows us to add new features (weight mapping, body chips, etc) to any mesh that doesn't already have them

Poser gives us the ability to separate clothing from figures, every character has access to every other figure's wardrobe (except for shoes - OTOH, if I ever get the hang of Shoe Last, that problem will also go away.

We also have helper programs that will allow us to move skin textures from one figure to another, hair from one figure to another, and the ability to add DS content into Poser, and save it out as Poser-native.

We have it better than everybody; well, everyone that actually uses the features available to them.