Beepster, I was talking to a guy who designs and manufactures exterior materials for new construction in New York recently. He told me that the current standard of construction when building a condo in New York is that they don't expect it to last more than 10-15 years before major structural upgrades and repairs have to be done. I think the standard of everything is going downhill.
Here's another story. I still have, back home somewhere, one of the first Marantz CD players from the early 80's. It still works great and is built like a tank, except the tray sometimes gets stuck when opening (to be fair, it got sat on by an overweight persian cat). About 10 years ago, my stepdad bought a CD player for about £100. It sounded great and so I bought one a week later. About a year after he purchased it, the LED display went on my stepdad's. How unlucky, I thought. A week later, the same thing happened to mine as well. To this day I am convinced the devices had a timer in them which disabled the display after a certain time.
The point is, if these things worked great, we'd never buy a new one or upgrade them. Keeping a program like Sonar with a certain amount of bugs sustains the motive to upgrade because you live in hope that the next release will be "the one" that solves all of your problems. I'm not singling out Cakewalk here, I think they all do it.