I don't see it all that negative. The unit works OK for me; recent mixes could be carried out from the surface to about 95%, but with all the features available I doubt you could go back to 100% mouseless workflow anyway.
I'd love to see that channel locking feature fixed, though, and plus some more customization options. There are so many button combinations which are "reserved" (a ka not used for anthing) which I would assign to features that require the mouse ... but I doubt that'll ever happen, so I might just build some MIDI interception layer myself ... got some ideas, just haven't got the time at the moment ...
What worries more these days is that there doesn't seem to be any indication of X2b. Knock on wood, I do NOT have an aweful lot of problems the way we record and produce, but occasionally (usually when using features that you don't need every day) it crashes and in complex projects Sonar seems to screw up settings of 3rd Party VST synths ... and ACT Settings are not remembered properly (a Sonar problem that support does not acknowledge to be there) ... but - if they go for X3 without fixing what we paid for beforehand, I won't be buying any more upgrades ...
Users of other control surfaces complain a lot about the fact that there haven't been any changes at all regarding their controllers (for 2+ years!) and this makes me wonder if Cake is nowadays just after the hobbyist market (which is probably bigger than pro and semi-pro together) ...
So when time allows I'd like to test the VS-700C in mackie mode with one of the other major DAW software tools. I wonder if they did properly implement the mackie protocol back when they released te unit because in that case it could be working reasonably well in these other environments.