FreeFlyBertl

Notecrusher
This is the most underwhelming release yet. I guess devs were on vacation.

Well, I certainly hope the devs were on vacation!!! They deserve it more than anyone considering all we got this year already ... and of course the best way to ensure high quality and innovation is to look after your employees and give them enough time off to do other things ...

I completely agree with your points. I look at this release as bug fixes and "oh by the way we threw in a new start screen for ya"! Nor do I want them to rush anything just to meet a deadline. 

Doktor Avalanche
If I were to speculate (badly I'm sure) all the effort is going into the upcoming audio enhancements.
The handful of bug fixes (track view mainly) appear to pave the way for it.

I think that's pretty informed speculation, because it takes into account that doing bug fixes and developing new features are opposing forces. If no one wanted bug fixes, SONAR would have lots of new features and if no one wanted new features, SONAR would have lots of bug fixes.
 
Historically speaking there's been a flurry of bug fixes after a major version release, followed by diminishing fixes as development ramped up. SONAR 2015 essentially started life as a major version release compared to X3e, and the bug fixes reflect that. The audio changes that have been requested are major and require a lot of work. Hopefully people will find that the results justify the time required to create those results although of course, there will always be those who will not find it useful for their workflow, and therefore will wish the resources would have been spent elsewhere. 
 
The difference with the new model is that bug fixes won't stop past a certain point as they did in the past, but are ongoing, although possibly at a reduced rate. If development slows down, the team can go back into the "bugs archive" and fix longstanding bugs; there's been evidence of that in the past several releases.
 
It's important to remember that everything involves tradeoffs. The object is to choose tradeoffs that provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people, which requires a bit of science (reading forums and taking surveys) but also some soothsayer chops.
 

Notecrusher
This is the most underwhelming release yet. I guess devs were on vacation.

The Start Screen was a pretty big feature that required testing and dev time. I think long term, it's going to be a huge improvement for both new customers and existing customers. As mentioned, we have some other cool features coming up that also require a bit of attention. Again, the point is to release features and fixes when they are tested and ready, not to play a numbers game that can result in issues for some customers. 

FreeFlyBertl

Notecrusher
This is the most underwhelming release yet. I guess devs were on vacation.

Well, I certainly hope the devs were on vacation!!! They deserve it more than anyone considering all we got this year already ... and of course the best way to ensure high quality and innovation is to look after your employees and give them enough time off to do other things ...

Andrew Rossa [Cakewalk]
The Start Screen was a pretty big feature that required testing and dev time. I think long term, it's going to be a huge improvement for both new customers and existing customers. As mentioned, we have some other cool features coming up that also require a bit of attention. Again, the point is to release features and fixes when they are tested and ready, not to play a numbers game that can result in issues for some customers. 

Also to add to whats said. The development process is not as black and white or linear as many people assume. We don't just work on fixes or work on new features. Often they intersect. For example for the last couple of months I worked on recording related work while developing the infrastructure for synth recording and patch points. This process led to a major revamp (refactor in devspeak) of the recording code. That is some of the oldest and most complex code in the app. In the process I made numerous improvements to that code that should ultimately lead to better stability and *much* better maintainability. A lot of that is difficult to document as bug fixes since it would be very time consuming to detect which specific scenario was broken before. We do log cases for regression testing when its obvious. The same thing happened when I worked on Mix recall - there were scores of small fixes and even crashes that were addressed through that effort.
 
All in all this is completely normal in the development process. You folks are looking at a small window of a month which is not a big enough sample size to accurately represent whats going on. i.e. some months will look smaller and others may look huge since we are releasing features only after testing. Next month will have a ton of updates coming online.

FreeFlyBertl
Well, I certainly hope the devs were on vacation!!! They deserve it more than anyone considering all we got this year already ... and of course the best way to ensure high quality and innovation is to look after your employees and give them enough time off to do other things ...

I have to say that the European companies have the right balance of work and personal life. I'm always shocked when I talk with developers there and they have weeks or months of off time. Its quite different here in the US (sadly)

I'm enjoying the ride :-0

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
I have to say that the European companies have the right balance of work and personal life. I'm always shocked when I talk with developers there and they have weeks or months of off time. Its quite different here in the US (sadly)

We have 35 days off time here in Finland which is about average in Europe.  Only in England there are under 30 days holiday.

Most companies here start new employees at 2 weeks and cap at 4 weeks after you have been there for years (decades). Its a pretty sorry state compared to Europe :)

Mesh

What's a this tak of peas?