Do you think it's better for me to go right toward DAZ? I know the default DAZ renderer is much more improved nowadays (like DAZ 4.15), however people along F95 keep making gorgeous real life models with lightroom, octane, firefly (poser), vue and other raytracers. I just wanted to get updated of the best render you prefer so far.
Well, since the question is on a public forum, I hope you don't mind if I chip in my two cents
First, an advantage of Daz Studio is that you don't need to rely on anybody else's opinion (mine included), since it is free of charge, probably the best is to just go to Daz, download it and use it.
I personally hate their "Daz Central" thing, to install packages (even stuff from Renderosity, sharecg, etc. I repackage) I use the "old fashioned" DIM, that works fine also off-line, but I use packages and repackage because I like smart content, you can just dump the files in the right place and use them.
If you still have somewhere you library of Poser content, you can just tell Daz Studio where you "runtime" poser directory is, and it will allow you to use the content (you can indicate even more than one Poser content directory), sometime there can be some issues with materials, but see below.
I admit I have not used Poser, but if you have a NVIDIA GPU with CUDA, Daz integrates very well with NVIDIA Iray (and the MDL material library, free from NVIDIA, you can find on sharecg for free something that smooths even more the integration with Daz, the metadata for it), and the rendering times can be really short (depending also on the card).
Octane is also a possibility as render engine (Daz allows you to use more than one), their newest Filament is also good, although AFAIK is more geared towards giving a rendered preview - though for these two, you may need extra steps for the materials.
Also, the shaders can allow you often to bypass even material problems when it comes to rendering, or even just avoid getting a lot of packages/files with extra materials for existing assets (got myself lot of stuff before realising I could do that approach), although in principle and theory materials and shaders are not the same.
About the generations, you don't even need to drop all the characters from V4.
Daz can use most V4 characters through the V4.2 bundle, then there are free scripts to copy a pose from V4 to G3 and G8 and viceversa, at least one product makes the materials of V4 characters compatible with Iray, and you can transfer the shape of V4 characters to G3 (and from there, in principle even to G8) if you like a character, and even use the original textures (I made a post describing one possible way to do the V4-to-G3 passage) if you want.
If you have Poser cr2 characters you want to import in Daz, you can also do that, and there are instructions to make the mc6 poser material collection files work with Daz (pz2 work also), at least as file.
Even just if you want to reuse your old V4 wardrobe with G3 or G8, there are "clones", converters, etc., so it is possible (though in some cases you may need to work a bit if you want near perfect results).
This can give you the freedom to use and mix G3, G8, and your existing V4 stuff as you prefer.
If you are an old time user of Poser, my understanding is that you will probably be already more than used to the interface equivalent to the content catalog of Daz, and may not be interested on the "smart content" - in that case, no need to worry about database (I like the smart content, but that's me and my monster assets installation).
Otherwise, others may disagree, but after you have catalogued your content in Daz the way you want, I would suggest doing and export of the metadata of all the products, not just a "user data" save from the database maintenance.
The second approach is the suggestion you see around in general, but recently I had to do a DB reset (rare occurrence for most people), and realised after that in the "user data" the product ID is set to 0000, which means when you reimport it, all of it ends up catalogued as "local user", a mess (at least, when you have accumulated thousands of assets).
Hope this helps