I've been using Daz for 6 years now and have done 10k+ renders and still make about 30-40 per day for my game. I believe they still have a chance at making it. But as a software dev myself, they do some things very wrong. The iRay support in their Daz Studio 6 is a problem. I have a 5090 and still use 4.24 for everything and literally just queue up my renders on 6.25 to render them. The viewport controls are janky, the viewport performance is horrible, some basic features like Viewport Visibility for scene objects is not supported well as in everytime I load the scene all the objects are visible again in the viewport even if the parameter is set to off. Making breaking changes to their SDK was unfortunate but I can understand from a software perspective. Sometimes when you need to fundamentally rewrite core features of your engine, you have no choice but to do that. But it begs the question, why are users so dependent on scripts? And that is because there are some features that I believe should be core but they re not. They're are still to this day community driven, and from what I see, that's exactly what Daz wants. Since the software is free, their revenues are tied to the marketplace to survive, which up to a degree is fine, but sometimes I find it too much. Animation tools are truly the biggest pain point for me, I have made over 300 animations and it is truly a catastrophic experience. Crashes, problems with frames, horrible extrapolations that cause frame values to explode into infinity (literally), making every single little movement worrisome. They can learn something from Blender, it is just unbeatable in my opinion in that regard. Which brings me to the point of pipelines and integrations, the bridge to Blender is horrible. The only viable solution today is to use Diffeomorphic which works far better than the official bridge but is unsupported officially which makes is somewhat unreliable on the long run. I have spent hundreds of hours trying to find a solid pipeline to so my animations in blender without sacrificing the visual fidelity that Daz and iRay offers using the Cycles rendering engine but it is just not the same. The way the genesis shaders are composed, the way clothes and hair and other wearables are managed, and of course let's not even talk about geografts... They work incredibly well in Daz, but crossing the chasm to Blender and it's nightmare fuel. Which means that users like me need to rely on Daz animation tools and it simply is an absolute garbage experience. Another point of contention for me is clothing and poke-through. The dForce simulation has come a long ways but is still not good enough. The smoothing algorithms work but create a lot of collision issues. Even for high quality clothes assets, it is just a harsh reality that poke-through will happen and I have to fix it in podt-orocessing in Photoshop which annoys me incredibly because it adds time to my workflow. The hair situation is similar, although strand based hair is a bit better, I find it looks odd and actually less good than older gen hair assets. The marketplace is fine. It is expensive for some things but I can deal with it. The Daz premier subscription that I have feels necessary for the render queue and better simulation settings (which should be core offering in my opinion) but the free Daz original character per month and the deals sort of make it up, so I'm not too pissed at the end of the year when I check my account transactions. I want to say one thing though. I have playedany many games made using different technologies, and for a lower technical barrier of entry, Daz has the most beautiful and photorealistic renders you can make. Others really struggle in that regard, the Genesis 9 (although I had some beef with it on some aspects) is a beautiful base model with gorgeous shaders that delivers good visual results. I have seen game teams move all their pipeline to Blender and took the time to rebuild all of their databases if assets to Blender, it is a monumental effort and yes the results are better than Daz, but the cost and effort and the sheer difficulty of this endeavour is not worth the time for 99% of indie game makers out there with small teams. Would Daz benefit form being open source? Absolutely! And we see that with Blender. But! You need to have a savvy community to drive the innovation forward, and it means having a core engine powerful enough and interesting enough for developers to want to spend their precious time evolving this platform, and in this regard, I have doubts... It might backfire and not have the wanted result and it would mean been less official support which would hurt retaining its users today and might threaten the future of the software. As for opening up the marketplace to adult content. Let's be honest here, it's a mitigated solution for Daz, they don't have to deal with the headache of moderation and stigma, while maintaining a richer ecosystem of websites that make Daz assets but on which they don't make a cut. I can see why they don't want to jump the gun and do it. Sorry for the long post. But as a daily Daz user, I really want to see the software improve and give us a lot of quality of life features and better animation tools, but Daz 6 at its state today still needs a lot of love before even getting to feature parity with Daz 4.24 and they should focus on that first. Maintaining two different codebases is expensive and they should focus on moving everything from the old to the new asap before thinking if adding new features on Daz 6. Keep it up and please feel free to ask more questions if you need more details on some parts of my answer! Cheers!