OK I am greatly impressed with the quality and quantity of the loops. That said, if I had access to a free download of the best 5000 loops ever created I would not give them hard drive space. I just never use loops. I am afraid they are the kind of content that has little value for me, although it undoubtedly justifies a high price for some. The same can be said for synth voices, reverb tweaks, guitar amps and so on. If Cakewalk were to include a new synth of the quality of Z32a, or Dimension Pro, I could use that. I bought both at full retail before they became free "content" for Sonar. I do not even have much use for a large number of audio effects, although I know the aficionados of such things treasure them immensely. Still I expect that usually such connoisseurs buy the ones they want retail. But it sounds like the kind of thing you were offering as a bonus to Sonar owners a while back, which I also found no use for.
I am pretty sure I do not represent the typical Sonar user, but from the hodgepodge of content listed, it is difficult for me to discern who Cakewalk thinks their typical user is. My strong impression is that in terms of visible usable improvements, this iteration of Sonar is less than impressive. The under the hood improvements may be worth the money, although I have not found X3 unusable for anything I have tried to do, but if the "content" included in this update is typical of what members can expect, I am not tempted.
btw It appears that, although some of the items in this update were undoubtedly off the shelf available at an earlier date, they were bundled into a single release. I understand that this makes distribution (and marketing?) easier, and I never really expected Cakewalk to offer downloads of updates "as soon as they were ready." I do not think that really matters to anyone, I just wonder why it became so central to the membership hype. With X3 Cakewalk did a good job of prioritizing and releasing bug fixes pretty much as soon as they were ready anyway.