This simply isn’t true though. I don’t even think it’s true for the majority of post-production engineers. There have been at least 3-4 times during the past year where I’ve tried to help people only to realize that they’re using Cubase and that features are missing, features that would have helped them accomplish exactly what they wanted. And they’re “minor” things that we don’t think about that we take for granted, like features in Control Room. I use that every single day I work with Nuendo.
As for the leapfrogging Fredo is right, and I think you should maybe look at this from the perspective of a Cubase user. If SB did what you and some others want then the result would be this:
A new version of Cubase with new features would be finished but would not be released for X weeks. Cubase users would be aware of that and wonder why it isn’t released when it could be, and the answer is “Because that way Nuendo users feel better”.
I think that’s exactly what would happen, and we should remember that there are probably way more Cubase users than Nuendo users.
And lastly, the thing that makes Nuendo feel more like a premium product than Cubase to me are things like more features and a deeper feature set, the brand/name, generally speaking more professionals with more knowledge using it, and it being pretty darn stable.
I can’t emphasize that last part enough: As someone said, right now there’s a lot of chatter among Cubase users regarding CPU performance, and if it turns out to be a fundamental bug that can be fixed we can probably be pretty confident that it’ll be fixed by the time N12 comes out. In a reverse scenario we’d be finding that bug first and it’d be solved by the time Cubase rolled out. I’m betting that would lead to complaints by us instead.
Modern DAWs are great, Nuendo is amaze-balls (the best in my opinion). Waiting a month or so isn’t a big deal. If it was like 6 months or whatever it was in the past I’d be annoyed, but hopefully that’s not the case. It’s not a big deal. Turn on the news and put things in perspective.
PS: I don’t mean the above to be ‘personal’ btw. Just voicing my opinion… 'cause I’m bored…