I can't help but noticing that the rapid pace of physics development in games has produced some really nice realtime simulation engines.  It's becoming more than a little frustrating seeing games looking this good in motion when I know what hobbyist animators have to go through to create dynamic hair and/or soft body effects.  For example, of the four programs specific to figure creation and posing, only one of them includes realtime soft body dynamics (in the form of a spring solver).

(I count Carrara because nearly all of the work currently being done on it revolves around compatibility with the Genesis figure)

It would be so great to have hair like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m77Ocf3A3PE

I just don't know what's holding the developers back from implementing these "game" physics techniques in the applications we use. 

Do they feel the results aren't of high enough quality?  It would at least allow us to have more incidental characters on screen if we had something between prop and strand hair in Poser...

Is it too expensive to develop them?  While our apps may cost 5-10x what a game may cost, that doesn't mean SM or DAZ have the resoures of an Epic or Capcom to implement these techniques while improving other key features of their applications.

Is it a technical issue?  These sims run in realtime.  Our apps render "baked" animations.  Is there something particularly challenging in calculating and storing the data from these sims so that they can be rendered?  Perhaps when the sim is run in conjunction with the renderer the results can't be accurately previewed?

I love Poser, and haven't totally given up on Carrara either (though Bullet sadly hasn't yet become the solution I anticipated).  I also have iClone and see tremendous improvement over the previous version.  That said, I am increasingly leaning toward game engines for the large populated environments and "good enough" physics simulations they offer.  Will this gap only continue to widen?