I'm an animation student, hand drawn and traditional stuff.
I have to say Avernum 3's graphics were far better, and I'd rather have no animation, and just pose to pose, than these terrible animations in A4. A3 had all these graphics for different situations, if they were wearing armor, using a pole weapon, sword, mace, oh it was beautiful, even if it wasn't moving.
Ideally you could go back to that and animate those. That'd be totally awesome, and look alot better. I know you could do an energy building trick to get them to be able to snap from pose to pose with minimal drawings, if you wanted to go that route again. It may or may not look better than no in between drawings.
Poser was originally made for painters and illustrators, so they could pose figures quickly and easily for reference in their paintings and illustrations. As such, I assume Poser has absolutely no real rendering options, merely because Poser things I've seen always have terrible surfacing. It wasn't really created at it's inception for professional final output, though it's quite popular among hobbyists. Perhaps it's the hobbyists lack of mental ray(if Poser even has that?) expertise that's the reason for bad surfacing, and not Poser itself.
It's a really sad trend, I think, of small time developers using cheap, low end 3D graphics instead of charming pixel art.
I wish I could 'intern' and make Jeff much better, principled animations for free(student's want work experience and credits desperately), but I can only animate(not rig, not model, not surface) in Maya.
I doubt I could integrate into Jeff's Poser workflow even if knew how to use it. I sure can't move to Seattle(that's where he is right?) . The pixel art way would have been possible but it'd take some learning of how to move from pencil art to pixel art. That was just a dumb fantasy of mine anyways; I've played Jeff's games since I was 8 years old and oh, wouldn't that be awesome?
I really play Exile/Avernum for the writing and the story, though. These are minor complaints.