I do not argue with your insights, gabrierikdesign and I fully agree that Daz 3D is completely ignorant of Bryce, it does not even accept new assets (my second last was declined within 35 seconds (!) and the last one I tried took less than 2 minutes to be declined). Interestingly enough, I have 59 sets for Bryce in the Daz store and they still sell enough for Daz 3D to keep me as a PA.

Nevertheless, I still run Bryce 4, 5, 5.5, 6.0, 6.1, 6.3, 7.0 and 7.1 on a Windows 2000, an XP, 2 Win 7 and 2 Win 10 and even use Network Rendering (though not very often).

Bryce has its limitations, no doubt, but it is versatile. You can do abstracts, landscapes, space scenes or under water scenes, objects, vegetation, ... I find it difficult to use it successfully for characters, particularly close-up faces. Renders can take long, even on my i9 16 core CPU Win 10. Raytracing always takes more time than pathtracing because it makes less shortcuts.

The memory limitation of 2 GB (or about 3.5 GB with LAA) is a severe limitation. Compressing a final scene to save on disk is probably the worst "advantage" that was introduced with Bryce 6 because it is done in memory and thus limits it even more.

I can not comment on animation. I had tried it a long time ago and realised that I am a complete nut doing movies.

The last update to Bryce was made in 2011, and this is - as far as computer programs are concerned - an eternity. Looking on the bright side: no new bugs were introduced and meanwhile I know a lot of them and found ways around them.

So for me, Bryce is not dead.