Stability = No crashes. The stability thing is a red herring, argue about that till the comes come home (it's stable for me, sorry if it isn't stable for somebody else).
 
Chasing a moving target is the real issue, define what you like as important something is always going to be more important than something else for somebody else. If you aren't regularly releasing builds that fix regression issues before the next new feature set comes along then you are always chasing a moving target (one month your drum maps go, next month it's your 32 bit plugins, or whatever example you choose to use).
 
A monthly cycle can work it just needs tweaking, fix regression issues before you move onto the next feature set (that probably requires two releases a month, one to fix regression bugs, as I stated earlier).
 
Cakewalk say they are going to do it but only for what they class as major issues that don't have workarounds.

Yeah, totally. I'm not against the membership model; but if I pay out $149 for some software, I would much rather have 1 decent version of it than a choice between 12 differently-broken ones. Right now, I need anything but Everett or Cambridge for my drums, Everett for one of the 32-bit synths I use, anything but Dorchester to avoid glitches with PLAY, and anything after the initial release if I want to use the Piano Roll. It's getting silly.

Does anybody really believe that development wasn't continuous under the previous model.
 
If you wait for the smoke to clear before adopting any one of the releases along the way, you will have taken a positive step toward minimizing risk.
 
 

Kylotan
WE CURRENTLY CANNOT USE THE DRUM MAPS AT ALL.

Shouting something does not make it true. If you reload the map, or reset the output of just one note number, the map will start working. It's only on initial load of a project with an existing map that they don't work. Yes, this makes switching projects frequently kind of a pain, but it's far from unusable.

Continuous development is a given. Nobody pays programmers to sit around doing nothing. The difference is that there was neither pressure to ship something new every month (even if it's a bit undertested) nor the safety net of knowing there would be a chance to fix it later (because every release was considered a big deal).

BobF
If you wait for the smoke to clear before adopting any one of the releases along the way, you will have taken a positive step toward minimizing risk.

Yup but you are missing the point, the smoke clears for one issue, and then the fire starts somewhere else. Without a regular stabilization release for regression issues then you are left with choosing the fire you want to cope with I guess (the fire that burns down your next door neighbours flat, rather than your own)....

brundlefly

Kylotan
WE CURRENTLY CANNOT USE THE DRUM MAPS AT ALL.

Shouting something does not make it true. If you reload the map, or reset the output of just one note number, the map will start working. It's only on initial load of a project with an existing map that they don't work. Yes, this makes switching projects frequently kind of a pain, but it's far from unusable.

So, you found a workaround, well done. This is hardly obvious and I wouldn't have found it myself. At the point where I posted, as far as I was concerned, this was true - the drum maps were not working, at all, in any project.

BENT
Great!!! I was going to update to Everett tonight but now will not, maybe "NOT EVER" this is the very thing that concerned me about the new release system. One has to question if it is a improvement or a step backwards. Yes I know I can roll back, but I don't have time to waste.

 
Rolling back takes less than two minutes. But basically, you have a choice: More frequent updates with lots of bug fixes that may or may not introduce new ones, or yearly updates with 12 months of accumulated bug fixes but which also introduce a bunch of bugs all at once, and which can take months to fix. People have short memories...there were five months of updates to X3, which had quite a few bugs out of the chute - X3a was released before the DVD-ROMs hit the stores.
 

At least with the old system I could wait months before updating to the latest release to make sure the features that are critical for my personal needs are stable.

 
You can do that now. This system is far more flexible in terms of giving choices as to how customers can buy, install, and use their software. So if there's some major bug one month that kills workflow for you, roll back or don't install and wait a month until it's fixed. (I don't think a bug has been introduced in a new release that wasn't fixed in the next month's release - e.g., custom buttons in the control bar persisted only to the right of the bar, which was fixed in the next release.) You can even do quarterly updates if you want. You didn't have the option of doing that with the old system. If there was a showstopper bug, you couldn't use the program and had to wait until the bug was fixed. Also, it's clear from the list of fixes that Cakewalk is paying attention to "popular" bugs.
 
No matter what system is adopted, there will be tradeoffs. The current model is not perfect; no model is. The real question is whether the new model has fewer tradeoffs or more tradeoffs than the older one. I think there is  no question that the new model has fewer tradeoffs because YOU choose when to update, and can update only to the extent you want if there's a bug that's essential to your workflow. And getting bug fixes every month, instead of not releasing new fixes when development starts on a new version, is huge.
 

One other topic that needs to be addressed is the misconception that X3's bug fixes were free. Bug fixes for commercial software are never free. The cost of resources needed to fix bugs is factored into an initial purchase price, or the price of updates.

Anderton
So if there's some major bug one month that kills workflow for you, roll back or don't install and wait a month until it's fixed. 

Yup you decide which regression bugs you want to live with, it's a feature.