Looks like a pretty concise analysis, CyberStretch. Nice job. "1. CL over-hyped the release of P5 by providing too many promises, positive posts, and assurances prior to release; despite the fact they knew the release would be buggy; causing unrealistic expectations from the users about the capabilities of P5." Of course they did. Going by the posts that Kupa made [The "we had to release, we had employees sleeping on couches and working unpaid" etc posts], they obviously felt that they had no choice financially except to release now after hyping to generate as many sales as possible. Never mind what it would do to their customer base, and never mind that it wasn't precisely equitable treatment of loyal customers... "We need the money, so we'll get all the sales we can regardless of the condition of the release" syndrome. So much for community relations. I suspect the timing of the promotional threads had as much to do with deterioating relations between CL and Daz and a desire to spike Daz 3D as much as hyping Poser 5, but I'm a cynic. "2. CL included the registration scheme; despite the community's prior adversity to such an idea; causing the community to revisit a heated discussion which, most likely, cost CL customers the first time around - as well as the second." Ah. But you forget... they had a "team of scientists" designing an uncrackable scheme, and accountants pursuing x amount of dollars lost to warez. What are disgruntled customers in the face of that? ;] "3. CL accepted pre-order funds before the product shipped; despite the precedent by most companies of withholding payment until the product is shipped; causing users to question their financial stability, which proved to be unstable per admission by CL." Reffer to "1)". Actually, CL admitted to that financial instability during the Poser 4 Amnesty threads, a number of months back. No indication was ever given that they'd progressed to a less unstable financial condition in the intervening time, nor any reason to believe they had. "5. CL failed to address many known bugs in P4 and P4PP within the release of P5; despite many P4/P4PP bug reports from users; causing users to surmise that the new features were merely add-ons over and above the P4/P4PP code base." They failed to address those bugs adequately in the 3 years following the poser 4 release, "working ful time on redesigning Poser 5 from the ground up" cited as the reason. The new features being add-ons to the basic Poser 4 codes is not a surmise: a look at P5, and a read of the 3rd party software contributors confirms that the render engine, material nodes, face room, and cloth rooms are 3rd party add-ons from Pixels 3D, Size8 Software, and Face-Gen. Lisenced plugin modules, not "new coding".

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• Monkeysmell