There are mentions in other threads that they do not own the rights to modify the staff view code. It has been suggested that Hal Leonard (the publisher) owns it and that Cake is negotiating some educational deal with him. Not sure this affects staff view.
As a programming task, writing a staff view is not a trivial task. It would occupy most of the Cake development team for quite a while. It is much easier to do user interface mods.
I have a feeling that this is what we are likely to get each month...simple user interface mods and bug fixes. The new model does not lend itself to new complicated features. We will have to wait and see.

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Throw in a couple of young ladies and it would be the standard contact negotiations corporate management is so fond of.

I try to avoid saying much in these threads becaue i really do feel some compassion for the frustration of this issue.  I can't  help but think the only way anything significant will ever happen with staff view is if third party  is acquired and integrated into Sonar. It just doesn't  seem like the number of people who would switch to sonar solely due to staff view improvements  is large enough to justify the resource expenditure.  I would be curious as to what the numbers are for any DAW as far as the number that use staff view as primary means of creating midi data. Perhaps some raw numbers, even if informal, would be more convincing  than repeating the same rant annually.

Dub,
I am inclined to agree. No way Cake is going to write a new staff view from scratch unless...they want to crack the education market and really compete with ProTools. One of the reasons PT is the defacto pro standard is their penetration into the education market. Students learn PT in school.
What I would really like to see is the adoption of a standard API interface for notation in general. And not just Sonar. Fav scoring software is Notion...use it. Fav is finale...use it.
Yeah, I know I'm dreaming.

microapp
The new model does not lend itself to new complicated features.

Why not?
 
Features can be developed in parallel.
Month 0           Month 1                                Month 2    Month 3                        Month 4
Feature 1----------------------------------------------------->Complete
Feature 2------Complete     Feature 3--------->Complete     Feature 4-------------------
 
I'm pretty sure the whole dev team does not work on one feature at a time.

 
I've been dreaming for a year or two of acquiring Sibelius, but I found the cost was just too high.
 
Now that Sonar may be 200$ / year, Sibelius is starting to look more interesting.  I think I can live with X3 for three years (thank God for X3).  I can buy Sibelius in the meantime and upgrade Sonar after that, if I really think it's necessary.
 
Or I could upgrade to Sonar with a proper Staff View...
 

dubdisciple
I try to avoid saying much in these threads becaue i really do feel some compassion for the frustration of this issue.  I can't  help but think the only way anything significant will ever happen with staff view is if third party  is acquired and integrated into Sonar. It just doesn't  seem like the number of people who would switch to sonar solely due to staff view improvements  is large enough to justify the resource expenditure.  I would be curious as to what the numbers are for any DAW as far as the number that use staff view as primary means of creating midi data. Perhaps some raw numbers, even if informal, would be more convincing  than repeating the same rant annually.

Ok, here some "facts" (and guesses) to use to maybe help you derive your own conclusions.
 
There are 1580+ pages in the form member list. Quite a few pages are users with 0 post count.
 
I did a rough page count of users with 100 or more posts (arbitrary I know). That is ~5000 users.
 
So let's say there are 1000 users that never created a forum account.
 
Let's say there are 1000 (near A level) producers or studio owners that chose not open a forum account.
 
I heard it quoted (more than 10 times in the last five years) that "many" want staff view fixed and/or enhanced.
 
What is the definition of "many" when we are talking 5K-7K (arbitrary guess on my part) users? 1%, 3% or 5%?
 
5% would be 350 users (using my arbitrary high end guess which means those 2K of non forum users need to be "heard"). Has anyone seen 350 individual members actually band together and "demand" staff view be #1 priority?
 
My (arbitrary) observation since 2007 is that maybe 35 users have expressed disdain over the lack of staff view changes. That's about 1/2 of 1% (again using my arbitrary guess of the user base).
 
Now suppose that the user base is actually 20K users (another VERY HIGH END arbitrary guess). 35 users isn't really all that "many", is it?
 
let the calculation bashing begin....

BTW, I realize the only real fact in the above is the number of pages of forum users.

Or maybe 19,765 users will not upgrade until staff view is worked on.
 
Now that is "many".