"So if I were to treat you the way you are treating merchants. I guess what I'd have to do is sit in on one of your classes. Take notes. Then come here and rave about all the mistakes you made teaching your classes." I already get evaluations by my students at the end of each course. I get both the good and the bad, since the surveys are anonymous to faculty. I enjoy the good, but mroe importantly, I study the bad and work to correct it. There is an astounding lack of the latter in and about Poserdom these days. "Well if I may be even more Frank with you, If you want to present yourself as a credible consumer advocate giving objective product reviews, you should at the very least personally buy ,install and test every product that you review yourself " Funny you should mention that; if a given complaint isn't readily apparent but still merits further investigation, I may just end up doing that... a lot. I have an empty P6 Runtime and nothing better for it to do, since all the good stuff still sits in my P5 external Runtime. But, I want you to notice something... the items I pointed out thus far (mostly out of frustration that everyone screams "quality!" when there are such obvious lacks of same about), those items didn't even require a purchase... the promo renders were enough to tell the story for all to see, and damnit, that's truly sad. I have a feeling that there's a whole lot more of such examples floating about the place (and quite a few others) if I dig deep enough, and I now have lots of leads from which to start looking. If what I've said so far today scares the PTB at various sites into actually auditing what they have 'on the shelves', and weeding out the more obvious crap for fear that I may find it before they do, then something positive has already happened IMHO. So what's this all about? Well, I intend on sitting down and working up a series of criteria from which to figure this whole thing out first. I've gotten lots of good ideas of what to do with this mess from folks in lots of other places - ideas that I really want to put into action and put to work (you know, places that haven't shut down the thread out of immediate knee-jerk reaction and incinerated the thing for fear that someone, somewhere may accidentally see it?) For now, I'll sit back and gather information (and even some damned good analysis) to assemble into something that my brain can chew on for a bit. Then, I can start putting something together that might actually make a worthwhile and even positive difference in improving what's being done in and about Poserdom. Sure beats the hell out of sitting back with the popcorn crowd, watching the whole thing slowly suffocate on this incestuous gas of make-nicey mediocrity that seems to be creeping into the air of late. So, does this mean that I get to be a total asshole? 'course not... there has to be something useful about it, since anyone can just point and sneer. Lord knows there's enough out there to sneer at these days... and the really sad part is, very few in Poserdom will argue against even that statement. OTOH, it might require a few bruised egoes, an increase in tutorials and tips for those who didn't get pointed at and analyzed as examples, and it'll require more than a couple of slaughtered sacred cows. Why? to show that hey, maybe there ought to be some standards re-set by the stores. Maybe there ought to be more efforts made by the PTB towards having good merchants (as well as the PTB itself) help out the aspiring ones, and just maybe, we ought to be less concerned about a 'sehwwer's widdle feewings', and be more concerned about improving the merchant group as a whole so that everyone benefits in the end. Is that too much to ask, or have we already sunk too deep into the septic tank to pull ourselves out? I Blather, You Decide... ;) /P