I don’t know what you want to do exactly but I do have a few thoughts based on your questions…
I started with Poser because I did not want to model people. I wanted to model sci-fi type stuff, mechs, ships, and things like that and initially wanted figures for sense of scale. At the time I found it very difficult to get my models into Poser. I had to learn which formats to use, how its materials worked, how the grouping tool and joint editor worked. I sometimes even suspected that this had been made deliberately difficult, so as to encourage me to purchase assets rather than create them myself. As I learned to work with Poser, it changed hands several times while also maturing significantly. It became much easier to make and modify figures for example, and over time I came to better understand how Poser itself worked internally.
Of course Daz Studio only exists because Daz, having seen Poser languish while between owners, needed to insure there was a platform to host the content they had made a business providing. Studio is now better than Poser in many areas, but not all…
I also got on board with iClone, and I did (and sometimes still do) feel like they have mastered the art of nickel and diming their users but the reality is that someone has to make these things and not everyone is going to need or use all of them. What they provide is very well implemented, and I do prefer the direction they have gone (dynamic, real-time, GPU-based) to what Daz Studio and Poser offer.
There is no make art button. It really doesn’t get any easier than these programs. The more you rely on pre-made assets the harder you will have to work, the more clever you will have to be, to make something that stands out from everything else. Those assets are great to flesh out a world, but the most important elements - your main characters, settings, vehicles etc. - should be unique to your production. Changing textures on an item can only change it so much. The trick to using all three of these programs to their fullest is leveraging what is provided in the marketplace(s) and then deciding which things you can (or must) make yourself.
Don’t mistake wanting to buy iClone assets for needing to buy them. If you have 3DExchange you can make most all of those items yourself, bringing them in from Wings, Rocket3F, Meshmixer, blender etc.
Also, you might like something like Source Filmmaker. It’s getting very dated at this point, but its animation capabilities are far beyond those of both Studio and Poser. Probably beyond iClone as well.
https://www.sourcefilmmaker.com/
Or just go all in and commit to learning blender. MBLab is a character generator for blender that is as close to having Studio/Poser inside blender as you can currently get. It’s a shame that the original creator abandoned it, but it is still being maintained and is compatible with the current version of blender.
https://mb-lab-community.github.io/MB-Lab.github.io/
