Wouldn’t it be better to compare apples to apples?
How does Cubase support compare to Logic, PT, DP, Bitwig, StudioOne, Reaper, FL Studio, and Ableton? And how is it handled? i.e phone, email etc?
You mentioned PT. Years ago in a real studio we paid huge amounts for HD TDM support. I have had great support from Waves. Also, even though you didn’t mention it, excellent support from UAD. My guess is that Steinberg is swamped with support demand because of their genuine sale a few months ago. That’s not an excuse, however your resources are limited and every DAW has a budget for support.
My very limited personal encounters with Cubase support, which is 2 in the past 15 years, would suggest you don’t necessarily get better official support vs. asking questions in the forum. But when there are no forum replies, wrong answers, a difficult or obscure question, poorly written question or the user doesn’t use proper Cubase nomenclature, it can be hindering and therefore your only option is to go to official support. If it’s difficult or obscure IMO a good chance all the support help will do is forward the questions to Germany.
But they don’t always. You often do and I appreciate that. Regarding bugs, in years past, I have seen several pages, for example the drum edit issue that went on for many weeks until a Steinberg representative finally chimed in to say it was a known issue. IMO, there should have been a much quicker reply instead of allowing the thread to mushroom.
And then there are issues that are not bugs, but things that change from version to version leaving a lot of questions and frustrations For example, the auto-scan of media bay.
3 pages, and 45 days later, representative Felipe Garcia said this "the reported behaviour identified as BON-7138 has been closed because it is not a bug, but per Design. The implementation works as intended and it was introduced with Cubase 7.x
The Media bay should only re-scan ‘VST Sound user content’ and ‘VST3 preset folders’ Track presets each time. All other locations stay blue and will not be re-scanned."
What Felipe didn’t say is that the re-scan for VST sound user content and VST3 presets automatically check those boxes that the user has purposely left unchecked. And when questioned why this horrible behavior, there was no reply from any Steinberg representative.
So yes in my opinion it can be very frustrating. If representatives would just communicate a bit more I think it would help. Even if they can’t comment due to numerous reasons…just a simple “we hear you and will try to get an answer if possible” would do wonders.