I'm not gonna spend much time on this, but a couple clarifications are in order I think.

1) I was bashing MikeJ (who is being good-natured, anyway). When he beat up on SM, I tried to explain why SM is doing the right thing by ignoring CG realism elitists. SM is responding to its market, which collectively and by majority is not interested in producing high quality CG work. The people who are interested in quality output, they move to other applications. Sometimes there are lingerers who talk about improving Poser instead of abandoning it. Then those like Mike come along and say "abandon!" and the lingerers are offended. I was at first, but after I thought about what is happening at SM and why its happening, I made my flame post. Mike should not bash Poser or SM, because SM is being responsive to its customers, which is another way of saying SM is not paying much attention to render quality, like it or not. Those of us who want that are in the minority and probably should move over to other applications, or we should beat the shit out of the rest of the community and make them understand and demand quality rendering.

2. In doing #1, I had to bash the Poser community, because it (collectively) deserves it. When your product maker has to spend its engineering time trying to organize your bloated content library, instead of improving the quality of the way it handles your content, you've made your own bed - now lie in it. SM is responding to the demands of its market. I know, because I'm actually involved in (CENSORED) and I'm building the new (CENSORED) for SM instead of working on the (CENSORED) or the (CENSORED), which is what I should be doing. I have had many interesting conversations with SM about rendering, lighting, and shading techniques and they don't have enough time to address all the ideas we've discussed because the market has spoken and they want (CENSORED), so that's what they're working on and responding to.

3) Those of you who took offense at what I said, and spoke up to give reasons/arguments why you need to keep things the way you're keeping them - you did not in any way contradict me. Your objection was a demonstration of exactly what I'm talking about. You amplified my point beautifully.

---

Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)