Mystic38
This is a totally pointless thread.
 

of course it's not pointless, discussion helps people deal with it, you don't have to take part

Multipart answer:
 
The short and simple part is the direct blame for current handling of situation is all on Gibson.  I doubt this decision was made overnight and they strung customers along with a model that was bound to cause mass panic when things collapsed.  
 
The long term blame to a degree falls on Cakewalk.  Cakewalk has a loyal following, but has been like that old relative that everyone respects because of history and name recognition.  The reality always found a way to manifest,  How many of us are used to any controller or product listing every DAW but Sonar for compatibility.  I have only ever purchased one controller that had Sonar as a preset out the box. Even mags like Computer Music tend to focus on other DAWs exponentially more.  This was occurring BEFORE Gibson acquired.  Cakewalk was acquired because it was struggling and a drag on Roland (who also botched things). 
 
I always thought the huge mistake Cakewalk made was not recognizing the shallow and trendy nature of their business. They made a great product that a generation of young producers/beatmakers/ musicians are unfamiliar with. 5 of the current top 10 songs on the Billboard hot 100 are made in FL studio. Cakewalk made a great product that was not great at the trends in pop music.  Correction to myself.  Cakewalk could do some of those things but they were not intuitive and Cakewalk never seemed to go out of their way to fix that image.  Even products that were well regarded like Z3ta and Rapture suffered from image issues despite being vey powerful. I would put Zeta+, Dimension Pro and Rapture up against any DAW's stock synths.  Even sound designers that know Cakewalk synths well gave up on making presets for them .  Xenos makes presets  used on hit songs , but abandoned Zeta because the demand was not there. This is a monkey see monkey do business. It's sad but insane to ignore.  Damn near every project hip-hop studio in America got those awful KRK monitors after videos showing  one  of Jay-Z's producers in studio with them (actually they were a much more expensive brand that had similar yellow woofer  but KRK benefitted from mistaken id) while creating a song. The lack of association with big name artists pretty much excluded them from the very large wannabe market that many amatuers fall under.  There are a lot more kids trying to be the next Deadmaus or 808 Mafia than there are kids dreaming of making the next  great progressive rock song.  No disrespect to any genre intended.  Modern music trends can be annoying, but from a business stance, it is madness to ignore those trends.  When the Katie Perry's of the world started making number one songs with trap music as backing , and the pop scene became a hybrid formula of Disney kids making watered down RnB/pop with featured rapper of the moment, Cakewalk should have responded.  I work with many young aspiring teens and young adults who love contemporary music and not one of them have heard of cakewalk.  Their shallow but understandable question is often "who uses that?"  I'm not saying  that Cakewalk should have went all out and signed big star of the moment into some kind of endorsement deal.  Even if they wanted to take a less mainstream route, they could have went all in on composers.  No secret that the staff view users have been annoyed for well over a decade. I get it that they wanted to create a great all around DAW, but that resulted in the jack of all trades, master of none dynamic that holds up well in a formal debate but terribly in market.