I'm pretty late to this thread but wanted to chime in on a few things. I mostly post to the gallery, but occasionally I like to see what's up in the forums, so yes, a few folks do both :-)

Like Y-Phil, my favorite version of V4 is the Sasha-16 by Karina, and I use the update released in 2019, which I beta-tested for Karina. Her weight mapping produces bends that aren't quite as nice as those from Nerd3D's weight map (no longer available?), but given all the OTHER nifty features that Karina packed into the S-16 CR2, I'm fine with that, esp. since I don't do nudes. When I want to do a one-time render with a female character, I often use the "regular" V4 (sometimes with the Perfect Arms add-ons). But when I was setting up a bunch of female characters for a graphic novel, the S-16 version was a no-brainer, given how much more functionality she has, like the eye-beams and all the easy-posing dials. (I even borrowed the eye-beams idea and made them for all the other figures I use!) Making clothes work with the modified rig is pretty easy in most cases. And Karina's HTML manual for her has stuff in it that every Poser user could benefit from reading, esp. about posing, all very clearly written.

As for the original question: because I use V4, M4, and K4 when I want "realistic" humans, I do still buy content for them, but only on sale. Mostly I buy clothes or hair (which I, like others, treat as universal, since it's fairly easy to fit hair to any figure, esp. 3Dream's hair!), but I might buy a character if it's by one of the vendors whose work I love AND if it's got some interesting options for creating fantasy characters. (I have no interest in photorealism.) I'm not sure I'd take the chance on a character from a new vendor. I also don't really care about the shaping morphs from a character package as much as I do the textures. I already have a thousand ways to shape V4 however I want!

The figures I would LOVE to have more content for are the ones by Nursoda. I have nearly all of them and they are always a joy to work with. They don't always bend that well, and they don't have a thousand shaping dials, but they're so charming and full of personality that it doesn't seem to matter! I did take a stab at weight-mapping some of Vila's joints, but I'm not sure it was worth the bother, other than as a learning experience :-) I've made new skin textures for many of Nursoda's figures, and that makes them a lot more versatile. But I'm no good at sculpting, so having some more shaping and expression morphs for them would be handy. What I would most like, though, is more clothing. I've made a few very simple things for them in Cheetah3D, but my modeling skills are better suited to props than clothing. I've managed to convert a few items for V4 and other figures for use on Nursoda's figures, but often the style isn't quite right. I guess what I really want is for Nursoda to make more clothing for his own figures, since I love his style, or for someone else to take up that same style. PixPax has done a nice job of that with outfits for Fehn. But I can't imagine that's a big market.

Those weight-mapped versions of A3 are pretty impressive! Definitely makes her better suited for action scenes! As for the high poly count, I did a bunch of experiments a while back to figure out what caused Poser to slow down on my Mac, and I discovered that poly count has nothing to do with it (not in preview or in render). The number one culprit was: the number of conforming items in the scene. The more conformers, the slower everything gets. I've already tweaked all the settings I could to speed up preview performance, but that's one I can't do anything about, alas. I can load prop sets with millions of polygons and have no trouble, but load three V4's wearing outfits that come in lots of conforming parts, and everything crawls! Oh well, some of those outfits are worth it :-)

So that's my 42 cents! Thank you to the three people who read this far :-)

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TOOLS: MacBook Pro; Poser Pro 11; Cheetah3D; Photoshop CC

FIGURES: S-16 (improved V4 by Karina), M4, K4, Mavka, Toons, and Nursoda's people

GOALS: Stylized and non-photorealistic renders in various fantasy styles