Let me make a few comments.... I have been too quiet of late anyway :)

I think the folks at CL rock. They have always been available and informative. When I have needed too I have been able to get in touch with Steve Cooper and not get brushed off - he has been a valuable resource. Does that make me biased? Maybe. I don't see how it is wrong to have a positive opinion of people who you think are doing the "right thing".

That being said, of course it would have been better to have had some more fixes to Poser. The delay between Poser 4 and 5 has seriously threatened the momentum of the software and it's market. Make no mistake, the folks at Max, Truespace and Lightwave have seen recently that there is a serious dedicated "pro-am" core to the 3D world and they are coming hard and fast.

Will Poser 5 change that? Can it survive in the face of the onslaught to come? Hard to say - but I think it might do it... if the community that supports it stays with it; and that will only happen if the features are there. CL knows that I am sure, the community is the core advantage Poser has... the Poser 5 upgrade will keep CL in the technology race, but it will not leapfrog the high end systems... they simply don't have the resources for that.  So it comes down to content - that's what makes Poser a commercially viable platform for those of us who use it to make money, and that's what makes it a valuable tool for hobbyists. The "Content Paradise" component seems to indicate strongly that CL recognizes this as well.

Do I wish CL had done more for Poser 4? Sure. But only they know their resources, and a delay in Poser 5 would have been fatal to this software and this community... it will be worth the trade off to make that release happen as fast as possible.

"basics like conforming clothing, I believe. And then there's Messiah:Animate, which is supposedly similar to Poser, although I'm willing to bet that it lacks some of those basics we take for granted, too (does ANY other app do conforming clothing? Lightwave? 3DS Max?), and costs a hell of a lot more. Way too much for me to even care what it can do. It's far beyond my feeble budget."

Actually, all the other apps can do what Poser does. Conforming clothing is simply a matched mesh deformation - and it isn't really a viable one for production scale rendering at that. In Max, Lightwave, Truespace and others you would make the clothing a separate boned figure and tie the bone parameters to those of the primary skeleton. You would get the equivalent of conforming and you would have a lot of control over the process.

Technology has never been on Poser's side. What HAS been is the content - the community makes it worth it because in the end I can spend a week or two setting up a Max figure or an hour or two purchasing what I need for a Poser figure... as long as a lot of animation isn't needed that will work just as well and be a LOT faster. With Poser 4 this crucial economic reality has been slipping... clients are demanding more and more realism and it begins to take longer to fix Poser's flaws than it would to use Max all the way. The Pro Pack helped this, and was a much more significant upgrade to this community than most people realize I think because of it.

Now comes Poser 5, and that scale will be evened out much more than it has. Poser will have a competitive renderer to many low end systems (though not up with the real big guns) and the technology to once again make Poser content a economically useful first choice for those in the industry. That will be invaluable.