The quality of Character Creator bodies is lagging way too far behind faces. In the first place, the default proportions are silly string beans, with ridiculous lengths on arms and arms. Fortunately, this can be addressed by starting with a little bit of Baby morph. What can’t be addressed is the neglect given to musculature, surely based upon the low poly count. I complained about this years ago and was told to get over myself because animation performance was more important. Well, it’s 2025 now and PCs are more powerful than ever. A higher poly count with better muscle modeling is the next frontier for higher quality in iClone.
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Are you talking about CC1.0 ? 
I don’t think this is about CC1.0, at least not with regard to the poly count.
Fact is, from the shoulders down, the CC3/4 character mesh has about 9K polys which is not a lot and can be a problem. For example when I do my cloth simulations in C4D, I often need to subdivide the body mesh (that is used as a cloth collider) at least once because otherwise the low-poly look of the body mesh will translate to the cloth, especially with thin, flexible cloth on female characters’ thighs/butts.
Also, in my experience, a denser mesh improves the quality of collision detection (in C4D), especially if mid-to-high poly clothes (30-80K polys) are simulated on this low-poly character mesh.
So, yeah, I agree with @General_Picture_Animation: having a low-poly body mesh cannot really be excused with animation performance in the age of powerful GPUs and PCs. In the case of the current character mesh, I can fix the issues in C4D, but the low-poly thing is one of the main reasons why I don’t use ActorCore characters.
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The lack of joint corrective morphs is also a big factor that keeps Daz people away from the Iclone/CC4 eco system.
you often see characters in realtime game engines that look far better than the CC4 natives somehow.
but it seems the majority of the Iclone/CC4 user base is fine with the look of the native characters, so Reallusion has little to no incentive to update the base meshes.
Consider that much like they offer pipelines to better external render engines, they also offer their motion libraries in formats that are easily retargeted to the high quality character meshes of your external 3DCC’s and even the better looking Daz genesis models via BVH export from Iclone/CC4.
My characters wear clothes, for the most part.
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That might be a valid objection. except let me remind you that not all clothes completely cover arms and legs.
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Well, yeah, so do mine.
But sometimes my clothes don’t have a character in them and sometimes the clothes are pretty skimpy (bikinis and such) and show a lot of the character. And, as I explained before, the low-poly mesh can negative affect my cloth simulations if I don’t take steps to mitigate that.
So I would like to the introduction of CC4+ or CC5 characters with a higher poly count; it would also help creators of avatars/characters if the base mesh that they can use for sculpting is of higher density and not every smaller detail needs to be “faked”, for example with normal maps.
hmm, i couldnt even tell there were any issues with that. I am quite satisfied with CC3+.
There are currently 3 mesh subdivision levels which can be exported as such and sculpted elsewhere (non-returnable back to CC though).
I also have an experimental body/arms/legs (not the head) emulator via hi-poly cloth (about 300K max). It can be sculpted and morphs could be easily created. It’s not perfect, but could serve well under certain conditions. Here is Mason.
On the right regular character.
On the left, body is wrapped with hi-poly cloth and then I did some abdominal “workout” for him with sculpting in CC (given CC only has 3 brush types).
Body emulator topology
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Yeah, but the point is full compatibility. (BTW: If subdividing needs to be done, I’d rather do it in C4D then export a subdivided character from iClone.)
While the cloth-wordaround is a cool way to address this, I’d prefer an “official” solution that can also be used by other creators of avatars.
The “issues” may arise when you try to do things with a character, the mesh was not really designed for, such as detailed sculpting. If you don’t need/want that and are happy with the low-poly look (or use subdivsion/tessellation at render time), the CC3+ character mesh may work fine for you.
My “issues” are not related to the character’s use in iClone. As long as, for example, the soft-cloth physics in iClone use primitive collider bodies and not the character’s body mesh, increasing the poly count of said mesh does nothing for the simulation.
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I would rather have them develop a full featured shell system, similar to DAZ (and what I have tried to do here pushing it to the current CC limits).
This way you can do whatever you wish with the shell (add remove geometry, tweak weights, make morphs, etc, etc… without affecting a Standard base).
Not being a DAZ user, I’m not familiar with the DAZ “shell system” and can only speculate what that could be and what it can do.
However, I think RL characters will need to improve sooner or later and, for example, also introduce a muscle system that deforms the skin and this should also benefit from a higher poly base mesh (whether that could work with a shell system, I have no idea).