First a word to say that 3.5 is brillant. At least the part I had time to check in details, the amelioration to the xmaps, just nail it.
I do have a fairly simple request : could you keep us posted on what’s coming next? I doesn’t have to be that official, but a permanent post on this forum saying “we hope for a new update before___ with improvements to this or that function” would be great. We all know it’s a developing project and you’ve been delivering way over expectations since the beginning, so I don’t believe anyone is going to get mad if it doesn’t all happen at once.
Such announcements might get a bit of fun out of a new release, but it would avoid situations like spending the last two weeks remapping an entire setup just to realize it’s all changing. For the better, but still…
The team has become a bit more reserved in the last couple of years, but they still share information here and there about what’s coming — more information than was every shared about upcoming releases in the forums of competing software.
And, speaking of which, wouldn’t such a thread be quite convenient for said competing softwares, even if they’re still moving at glacial pace?
I’m sorry to hear that the arrival of certain new features in the new update will cost you some work in the short term.
However, it’s not practical for us to specify long in advance what we are working on. Aside from the competitive point raised by Luìs, which is certainly important, there’s also the issue of “the Osborne effect”, where talking in too much detail about future products suppresses sales of the current ones because everybody decides they’d rather wait for the new one, but most importantly, software development is hard, and we can only know what will actually be included in a particular version very close to its release. Developing Dorico is not like building self-assembly furniture: there is as much research as there is development in the R&D of building software like Dorico, and that means that there is a lot of uncertainty inherent in how things will turn out. Publicising features long before they’re ready is a recipe for disaster.
I try to give general guidance on what we’re working on, where possible, but don’t expect a detailed roadmap to appear, as it’s not going to happen.
Also, it wouldn’t really solve the - admittedly frustrating - problem that you give as a rationale. If the team gave a heads up two weeks in advance, but you happened to start your remapping two weeks earlier also, you’d be in exactly the same situation.