Quote - Pengy... both your responses attempt to negate current facts.. yes in a perfect world, EF would be falling off their huge pile of money, and we'd have had 2 completely new codebases by now.

Now let's go back to reality. EF doesn't have (and never has had) a huge pile of money to fall off of. Like many other 3d companies, they are strugglling with expensive high tech developement, with a very low cash flow (relativly speaking) to work with.

I actually agree with the facts presented there (and have actually argued along those lines in another thread), but not your premise.

One can re-write a codebase without draining the entire pool to do it. You simply hold off on pushing out an upgrade nearly every year (which is what appears to be happening nowadays @ EF). Instead, you skip a release one year, and present a whole new and improved version the 2nd year.

Quote - So my reasons that P7 is slower then P6 still actually stand. Can you agree with that? Not "what if" sideline quarterbacking of what could have/should have been done but the actual reality.

You presented it as if it were true of all software companies and packages, which is not true.

Perfect example: Apple OSX and Microsoft Windows.

In 1999, Apple took a rather painful step and began to abandon MacOS for what is now OSX. Developers hated them, and 3rd parties cursed them. Adobe (among others) threw a global hissy-fit. OSX 10.0 sucked worse than Windows ME (no, really... it did). 10.1 wasn't a new feature set as much as it was a massive package of bugfixes while everyone got used to the new setup.

But... 5 years on, and OSX is not only efficient, but it does everything Vista does and more, while doing it far more efficiently. OSX has room for growth. It is as flexible as all get-out.

Now compare that to Vista, which is a re-work of XP, which is a re-work of 2000, which is a rework of NT... the NT development chain stretches back into the late '80's - early 90's. That's right - Vista is running on what is essentially a 17-year-old codebase... and it shows. It shows in the higher hardware requirements, it shows in the higher disk requirements, and it shows in almost every other aspect you can think of.

To top it off, Apple has far, far, far smaller budgets than Microsoft. Almost always has.

EF can do a lot of this now... they still have the resources, time, and market share to get away with it; instead of money, they spend time. They may not have those in five years.

/P