I have explored Daz studio, on a number of occasions. The renderer stinks so bad it's like a whore house in Billingsgate at low tide, radiosity is confined to 3rd party plugins, with every other package including at least on GI solution as standard. Surfacing tools and results are awful, what other packages have produced well for years, Daz is still struggling with.
Daz3d, like Poser is mostly frowned upon in the industry with most of the releases aimed at a dubious portion of the community, whose attempts at producing 'art' can only be called pornography.
Now, obviously price comes into this and free or cheap software is always going to have people saying 'hmmm that must be crap' but look at Terragen and look at Blender, they both produce stunning results in the right hands and are incredible value for money.