Mettelus
As I am getting the feel more and more that this forum is becoming a "free beta test platform," it is disconcerting when feedback is often initially met with a workaround (as a "solution") or worse, a rationalized excuse as to why users should lower their expectations. The steadfastness of this mindset is the proverbial "train wreck waiting to happen." Something to consider, at least.
I don't think anyone is expecting users to lower their expectations. A workaround is not intended to be a solution. Also, there's not a lot of documentation that
doesn't have a troubleshooting section...and I wonder how many people actually had to avail themselves of the procedure that was mentioned.
The reality is that even if software sits on the shelf and is released eventually as a giant update, there will be bugs. It's likely there will be quite a few bugs that all happen at once. Then there follows several months of patches to fix them all.
The scope here is simply smaller. There were a lot of things released but nowhere near as many as a giant yearly update and AFAIC, the number of issues is proportionately small. Also, I'm not sure having multisamples installed outside of a folder (which is fixable) or having a control bar revert to a default are show-stoppers that will keep anyone from making music. Meanwhile, there have been plenty of reports in these forums of installations that worked smoothly, features that work as expected, and general happiness with the way this has all unfolded.
Of course there will be issues. I have never met a piece of software that stayed on 1.0 unless the company went out of business shortly thereafter
. But you can either change your model to a "rapid response team" and work to perfect that, or keep issuing big, infrequent updates and keep doing patches afterward. Either way, bugs are unavoidable. The question is would you rather have a few features (with a few bugs) happening frequently, or lots of features (and a proportionately larger number of bugs) happening infrequently.
As with the transition to X-series, there will be growing pains but I believe very few people who have proficient with the X-series want to return to SONAR 8.5. I think that as the Membership program gets perfected - remember, this is only month #2 of something that has not been done before by Cakewalk - few people would want to go back to the old model.