Hi Tom
I think the general frustration (although I speak for myself) with items being moved on the roadmap is the wait between releases (i actually think it's quite short - every 6 months'ish), but we're mostly not developers, we're users, so checklists don't really have timeframes to us as we don't appreciate how long these things take. If it's been shelved because it's going to take a month beyond your planned release date to complete, then i'd rather the V7 release be delayed for a month, than wait a further 5 months to see it in V8. The dailies simply aren't practical for a lot of us using Corona in production, I personally don't have budgets (both time and financial) to run the risks of using dailies in a live production environment. So we have no option but to wait for the final stable releases.
Things have been moved plenty of times, as already mentioned the clipper, I think the reaction is different this time, because it's a big feature, it's literally the number 2 most wanted feature after GPU/Hybrid rendering, and there have been major lengthy discussions about it on the forums. Not only that, but the fact half of the checklist items have been ticked off, makes us, as users, believe it's 'happening'. Which it is, just not when we thought it was. And the worst part, was this news was broken to us by another user, not one of the Corona Team. Your last statement was "we believe in sharing and being open with the community" - but you weren't. It was a community member who shared/highlighted it. I appreciate the roadmap is tentative, and things get moved etc etc, but when you can see something being ticked off, you have no reason to believe it won't be in the release. Had you emailed every paying customer, before taking it off the roadmap, with a note to say, "unfortunately ... bla bla bla" i honestly don't think you'd have got this reaction.
I'd rather each release have one big new feature, and the rest of the dev time spent on fixing previous big features that still don't work perfectly i.e. adaptive light solver, displacement, caustics
Take caustics for example, first introduced in V4, it's still painful to use and no plans for improvements until V8, 4 releases (over 2, nearly 3 years), that's a long time - which is probably where the 'supposedly' slow development comments come from.
Things like Material Library Content updates, and faster colour pickers, and new UI's etc are all nice to have's but not essential, and the take development time away from the essential stuff imo
I have no idea how these things work etc, but the takeover by Chaos, was met with a mixed reaction at the time, but I think people settled at the idea of, hopefully it means access to more resource, more cash injection so more/faster/better development, they even said it themselves in the Q/A about the merger, yet it currently doesn't feel that way, almost the opposite, and that takeover/merger was 4 years ago.
As Bluebox has said, although a few people disagree, but he's right on many levels. This isn't personal at all. Archviz is a small industry and it's easy to get 'friendly' with others, but at the end of the day, if you strip back the friendly nature of the industry (fanboyism as some might call it) you're a business and we're trying to run businesses on your product that we pay for, so we have every right to be frustrated/disappointed on a basic level. Just as customers would in any other industry. Plenty of analogies have already been used, but they all apply. In the world of todays 'subscription model' you rely on roadmaps for decision making as a business.
