So I guess if you bought a $500 TV, got it setup (if you could do that) and turned it on, and it only got one channel, you'd just go, "Oh, it's okay. They'll probably send a repairman out to fix it in a week or two. Good thing I like the Food Channel." That would be okay, eh? I think most people would have brought it back to the store, but since e-On and most software companies don't offer refunds, it's pretty much, we got your money, and we might get it to work later on. The examples you gave for Maya and Lightwave are part of this practice, but they don't excuse any software company that takes this tact.

Maybe I'm jaded. I've been a programmer for 18 years, I've seen the industry take this trend. It's not because software is more complicated necessarily, but because budgets and deadlines force the hand of the company to release and then test and patch. In the old days, patches were not easily distributable, so they had to have it right before it left, or it would be quite costly. Also there was no wrappers like OpenGL and DirectX to make life easier for everyone. You had to code for 20-30 individual card drivers (remember the old games that had a selection for video and audio card), which was far more prone to errors and still was pretty much solid out of the gate. I've yet to see a review in recent days that doesn't include the phrase, "This doesn't work, but there is a patch expected out soon." Just look at the Poser 5 fiasco.

I'm not saying that E-On is one of these companies, but the lack of alpha/beta testing in very obvious places (where the problem is inherent on everyone's machine) is hard to ignore and makes me wonder.

I agree that the plant editor is a step in the right direction and that the problems are within Eon's grasp to fix and I have no doubt that they will in fact do that...

And yes, I'll go away now, because it's not proper to go against the grain here apparently and actually say your mind, informing others of what they are getting themselves into. Silence is the best friend of the software industry. I'm not angry at all, disappointed maybe, but having been burned by the industry before, and seeing this happen far too often, does tend to raise my blood pressure, especially after the price...

ShadowWind