Anderton
But if you click read the release notes sticky in the forum or click on "What's New" in the online help, you won't be.
No doubt. And it is a good thing that there is an online way to access documentation of these ever-changing features, and luckily even the most computer-naive musician, would think first to look for "Release Notes" or would imagine that clicking "Commuity" would bring him to a de facto basic support portal for Cakewalk and not a friendly chat forum as it does on many verndor's websites, or would intuit that the e-Zine was actually not just a marketing flyer. If he were to look under the KnowledgeBase, where he might expect to find notices of critical changes that would result in what would seem to be errors, he would not find this information.
My wife and I have an ongoing dialog about software. After I explain how to use a program feature that has her confused, she invariably asks, "How would I know that?" The tone of her question is almost always angry and accusatory. Often I can say you just look in the manual, which, as an unsophisticated user of most software, she would not have done. But sometimes it is because there is nothing in the manual to explain the problem, and my superior knowledge was gleaned via an exhaustive search requiring that I know the jargon keywords that will unlock the magic wisdom of Google. Answers to most common problems are rarely to never available in release notes to software, and it is even less likely that a naive user would know to look there, and searching back through a couple of years of "What's New" may not be intuitive either.
Of course regular users of this forum will know all of these tricks, although many will still take the shortcut of posting here first as did the OP. But Sonar is marketed primarily to musicians as an accessible tool to make music, and many of those musicians will have limited experience in software maintenance and troubleshooting. Some will not read English with any facility. It will not occur to a significant number of these naive new users, while they are sitting at their computer reading the "manual" off their Kindle and working through a set of instructions that the manual he is depending on has not reflected the reality of the software it describes for a couple of years and dozens if not hundreds of changes.
The problem with managing software documentation, like the problem with most writing and especially indexing, is being able to imagine that you do not know anything about what you are explaining while you are writing the explanation. Without that seemingly contradictory ability, you are inevitably going to produce work that makes perfect sense to you, but confuses some of your readers. You have made a good part of your living over the years translating the work of software developers into explanations that are accessible to non-geeks, so I am sure you understand my point.