Here's a way to think about it that may help; Carrara does not yet have a cloth engine (nor, Anything Grows aside, does it really have the equivalent to Poser's dynamic hair). So via Native importer, you can bring in a figure and access Carrara's abilities to Model (aka adjust the mesh in ways impossible in Poser), use Carrara's improved bones (vertex weighting, which Poser lacks), use Carrara's physics, and of course have full access to Carrara's lighting and render effects as well as its texture options. However, if you want access to a cloth engine you need to go through Poser. So if you intend an animation with rippling cloth (and perhaps Poser dynamic hair) you would use the Transposer option instead. Technically, you have then chosen to do the figure animation inside Poser; you are still free to animated lighting, the rest of the scene, the camera, etc. within Carrara. And yet there is more. You can't change the figure's animation, but you can break the link with the Poser file and edit the materials. I also believe you can change the mesh to editable (not sure if that breaks the animation, tho). I guess that's still clear as mud, but that's the way I think of it: "Want animation -- go Carrara. Want cloth -- go Poser."