In reality, as long as major platform changes occur regularly (designed to boost sales of hardware, increase market share and profitability of competing platforms - Apple’s move to its own processors for example), audio equipment standards change frequently, software developers develop their own technology that may not be compatible with other existing technology, and users demand more and more features that are limited to smaller and smaller portions of the overall user base the level of effort the the developers will need to put into bug fixes, compatibility and optimization must increase dramatically or we will see the existing upward trend in the release of more and more buggy, incompatible and poorly optimized versions continue to grow in number until stability and value of our software becomes very poor.
Therefore, software developers (and hardware vendors) will need to dedicate more resources to the quality control, bug fixing, standards setting and optimization teams. This will cost money because resources do not come free.
One way to minimize the cost of bringing existing software up to proper operating level is to limit new feature additions and concentrate on fixing and optimizing what they have. That will require money from user fees.
No one says that the new feature development teams can not be working to come up with new, truly useful features that benefit the larger user base during this time as long as they can be seamlessly implemented into the optimization work flow, or the new feature implementation could wait until the optimized version has shipped.
I am a Civil Engineer that has worked on hundreds of projects all over the world where technology changes, standards variances and other factors change frequently…we had no choice but to adopt a posture of placing quality testing and control, error trapping and fixing and project optimization at the top of our workflow…because without it, failed projects would result…at times with catastrophic results. This situation with the Audio/recording industry is very similar…the only thing that prevents the situation from becoming a major issue is that the consequences of a “buggy” release rarely causes catastrophic results.
I have been a musician and studio owner for over 50 years as well. My partners and I are all of similar age and experience. That is why we look at audio software issues differently than others I guess. We know what is necessary to fix the problem and that is an incentive for developers to stop and make fixes a priority…and we know that takes money. So we are willing to pay every vendor we do business with an upgrade fee to complete the work necessary. If 20 vendors all charges us $150 for an upgrade of this type, the resulting total cost of $3,000 could be made up in just a few days of more efficient use of studio time.
I realize that for those users who are hobbyists, these costs may seem substantial. This is the trap that vendors get in when they decide to see their professional software to both professionals and hobbyists. Perhaps there should be versions for professionals at a cost commensurate with their use and a “light” version for hobbyists who do not require a full-featured product…oh wait…that is the way it used to be done. lol