Allow me the speculate more..
 
as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know. 

I'm still waiting to hear from Alex Westner. I remember his arrival was announced and he put out a couple of statements and that was it. I thought he was Gibson's man on the scene. He was even listed as publisher on some of Andertons monthly newsletters. Guess he didn't work out.

I doubt you'll hear anything from Alex Westner. Last I heard he wanted to get out of the music industry.

ampfixer
Noels comments are interesting but they shed absolutely no light on the current situation. He maintains that the plan was good, there were world class developers and they were doing great things. But why then couldn't they make any money?
The really nice LP plug-ins, the drum replacer and that amazing adaptive limiter should have been paid for add-ons according to the announced business plan, but they weren't. I'm a lifer and I wouldn't have had any problem paying for them. I expected to pay for them based on the Sonar For Life announcement. But they dropped the ball. No follow-through. The Cakewalk CEO has yet to make an appearance or offer an explanation. Was Noel actually the one running the company and making the business decisions? 
We still don't know anything

They should have been offered as add-ons to non-lifers.
 
The lifers should have gotten them included as it was still early in the lifetime program, where users needed to get the value out of the money they were asked to put down that was above and beyond.  eventually yes, I would have expected to pay for "in app" purchases, but not in the first year where lifetimes was basically like adding on another year of updates plus some.  
 
It has been said countless times that Platinum users were the minority of the company revenue.  I think we can drop the speculation that offering lifetime updates was the demise.  In fact, it is pretty obvious that it was a revenue boost to the company.  
 
What they should have done is open up those revenue streams to the bigger user base they have.  Sell the Adaptive limiter for $50 to anyone that wanted it and they would have sold like hotcakes.  The days of $200 plugins are over.  Cakewalk certainly needed better marketing and quite frankly "us" as the user based needed to help more.  

^^
IMHO should have been sold as separate plugins to everybody, lifers were a revenue stream. People would have been pissed if lifers got special deals.
 
Of course everybody is agreeing that these plugins should have actually been sold retrospectively, as though it wasn't blatantly obvious at the time when they came out that they should do this... Or if it was blatantly obvious to them at the time - it wasn't their decision, and they had absolutely no influence at all/nothing to do with it.

Hey Noel,
Good to see you here glad to see that there might be hope for the program we have come to love (or hate).

But, realistically, as much as I want to wait around for the announcement that someone has bought sonar code and team, you must realize that we are all smart enough to know it takes time to unravel this sort of thing, but it has also been almost a full two months since the announcement and THAT is too long to only have the news extended to social media channels and somehow expect that we, the customers, are not going to believe that it is over. The wording says its over. And for those if us who bought into the lifetime program, whether it was well intended or not, it IS over and I don't think there is a lot that can be done about the trust factor.

I would certainly still be interested in good news but as a business owner, I have to think that companies as large as Gibson and cakewalk had to have known that all of this was a bad idea and should have known better.

Tell Gibson to get on with it before they lose the remaining users they have.

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
I'm not sure why you insist on over speculating and extrapolating despite all my posts earlier to explain whats going on, but you are welcome to have your (false) perspective. There is no hidden meaning to the FB page change. The FB was updated today to mirror the website content, since apparently many people don't check our website and were contacting support with other normal questions about sales etc. No agenda from Cakewalk or Gibson besides syncing up to have unified information.
Keep in mind that there is just a small skeleton crew who are managing the services during this transition so we don't have an army of people to keep track of all the social media channels and handle support inquiries as well.

I think where Cakewalk went wrong here was that the announcement back in November should have been across the board. You did the announcement on the forum, and the Cakewalk website was updated too. Would it really have been that much more work to cut and paste the same announcement onto the Facebook and Twitter pages? That would have taken 2 minutes max. And then a circular email to all registered users. Again, with modern technology, these things take literally a few minutes. 
 
Having said that, it kind of disturbs me that so many people were knocked for six by that Facebook announcement. Two months after it happened and they didn't know. I think in this day and age, if you use software that is important to your life (either professionally or recreationally) then you have a responsibility to yourself to keep up with news and developments. 

Whatever happens I hope we are getting software that does not phone "home" for activation soon. That includes Rapture Pro. Any other plugins periodically phone home for activation purposes please let us know. Looking at the history, I perceive things are probably not going to be handled well rightly or wrongly.

I have no idea what the logistics are to roll out a unique set of codes for each registered customer. Gibson won't put the money into it. I would buy a set of install disks with my codes burned into it.

ampfixer
I have no idea what the logistics are to roll out a unique set of codes for each registered customer. Gibson won't put the money into it. I would buy a set of install disks with my codes burned into it.

Should not require extra codes, IMHO they will need to supply us new builds of the software (Sonar, Rapture, maybe CCC) that does not phone home as far as I'm aware that just authorizes locally, unless there is some sort of backdoor plan already in place (I'd be very surprised).
 
It would be nice to know how it would work...

EDIT. Of course any existing regression bugs would still be contained, those using older versions of Platinum to get away from them would no longer have the option...

Or maybe.