Basically, DAZ is a simplified version of Poser. A lot less options, less complexity, but you can still import most of the files you could use for Poser. Since there is a lot of free stuff for Poser out there, you can use it in DAZ. It is capable of stills and animation, and imports into certain other packages pretty well. I combined it with Vue in the past, and got some nice results, even though I'm not a 3D guru (you can find these examples in my Renderosity gallery).

So if Poser scared you, trying DAZ might be worth the effort. It's free (or at least it used to be) so no reason not to download it and play around a bit to see if you like it.