I know you are frustrated - but considering the level of active participation in both the forums AND in the development and release of 3 sets of maintenance to X3 thus far (and the promise of at least one more), that it is a bit much to be accusing the Cakewalk folks of 'Lip Service'. They have been uber present of late, including late at night and on weekends, trying to give everybody they can a smooth X3 experience.
Also, if I read your post correctly, the Cakewalk folks DID respond to you, indicating the issues are with the Slate components. In the other thread, who's link is posted above in this thread, the consensus was/is there as well that the issues are with the Slate components - including inclusion in Sonar AND in other recording software, as well.
I also found the following direct response from Dan Gonzalez (Cakewalk) to YOU, from thread:
http://forum.cakewalk.com/X3C-and-Slate-VCC-Still-not-that-happy-together-m2923255.aspx "
Yes, I'm currently looking into this now. Sorry for the frustration. The dudes at Slate Digital make awesome stuff and I really want their plugins to work fluidly in SONAR just as much as everyone else :)-DG" The above would seem to me to indicate that not only have they been responding to you, but that they are also interested in getting the issues worked out, and are indeed actively pursuing doing just that.
And, by the way, in the other thread who's link is above, Ryan Munnis (Cakewalk) ALSO has jumped in to indicate they are actively working with Slate to help them get their issues resolved.
Here is the snippet from that thread, with the portion of Ryan's post that pertained to the Slate components:
"
I personally sent a ton of analysis to the folks at Slate Digital since. To give them credit, they actually reached out to us in hopes to improve the compatibility relationship between SONAR and their products. I'm happy that they did. Hopefully they can make sense of some of the data and can figure out what's going on. In any case, they have my direct contact information if they need to follow up with us so this is hopefully forward progress."
AND, Dan Gonzalez also posted in that thread - here is his snippet from that post:
"
Steven Slate's stuff is unfortunately some of the most reported plugins as far as stability is concerned. I have emailed them personally a few times now without much luck. I'm sorry that you experiencing issues with their stuff. If you want, you could send a long a project. I own VTM and VCC and could possibly try to reproduce the problem."
And, for whatever the worth, failures from Unhandled Exceptions indicate that there is deficient code in the VCC component, as an unhandled exception means that VCC has been getting some sort of error response when trying to do something, but the VCC code is not constructed to include dealing with that particular error condition response.
In other words, if I write a program, and it does a 'call' to perform some task, and the task cannot be performed for some reason, an exception will be 'thrown', and my program should be written to deal with any of the possible return codes from the 'call'. If my program does NOT include programmatic means of dealing with the potential failure conditions for that type of call, the program will fail, with an Unhandled Exception.
The fact that your situation has Unhandled Exception failures in VCC means that VCC coding is deficient in dealing with some error conditions.
Based on all of the above, in my opinion this thread of yours is WAY off base - you are claiming things that are simply not true. Your thread title is false, unfair, and potentially damaging to Cakewalk sales.
I would urge you to give the Cakewalk and Slate folks opportunity to dig into this and get the issues resolved. They do seem to be actively working on it, even if it is taking some measure of time. Just hang in there and try not to let the frustration get to you. Is it possible that rolling back to X3b might help with this situation? (might be worth a shot).
Bob Bone