- How about a slider allowing me to adjust focal distance, everything else in the plugin is slider based.
You can click a focus point on the Viewport. And the Settings tab "camera"->"focalDepth" has a slider.
- A popup allowing you to set defaults for all new start up renders.
This is in the ArchiCAD and Revit plugins I have developed, and the Poser plugin update will enable this feature. Might not be in the very first update release, but certainly in by the second. You can basically import and export rendertargets (so pre-configured sunlight, IBL, etc). Plus you can set a "default" rendertarget. It's pretty neat.
- Keeping both the sunlight and texture environments so you can switch between them without losing what you previously had.
Again, this is in the ArchiCAD plugin, but the import/export of rendertargets probably supercedes this requirement. If you feel the import/export/default rendertarget doesn't do it for you, I can add this in in about 15 mins.
- Since the Live DB is internet based (I have no idea why, it's slow and it doesn't really have a lot of matrials in there), how about setting a wee small section on a hard drive somewhere where users can upload their own materials for others to share.
Mmmmmm. It the moment you can share .POE and .POC (although they don't package up the texturemaps). I would speculate that the cloud edition of Octane might bring some changes in this area. Probably not something I could easily do just for the Poser plugin.
- Get atmospherics working...man they are a pain... as you said.
This is all in your head

At some point you decide it doesn't work, then something clicks, and it's easy from there. Not sure this could easily be automated. What would be really good though is a sample pz3 file that people could download to see how it all fits together. Any takers?
Paul