Of course it is dead. It may not be totally useless now but soon enough. Time doesn't stand still.
Have to disagree here. A vertice stays a vertice, a face a face, and a bone a bone. Just think of Milkshape here. That is what i call basic, here the time stands indeed still. But it is still popular
This is true for today, so you are partly right, but Amy is right in the long run.
Sooner or later it will die. The new innovations are no more vertices and polygons. Coat3d shows this already. The artists dont care about polygons and vertices, they sculpt and not like you do in ZBrush, they do it with voxels, completely free, just drawing heir mouse. Polygons are still supported for retopology.
Many tools will catch up here. Even John Carmack wants to support this in his upcoming id-Tech game engine, there you can sculpt and render everything in Voxel trees. He is talking to hardware vendors to support his concept. The new Intel graphic chip is just a multi-processor cpu and can support such new concepts also. There is more flexibility, software renderers are part of this future.
Polygons will die as well as Truespace will die. It will not happen today, but it will.
New tools have to adapt and to evolve.
