Quote - - E-on can chose to cater to whichever customer base they chose. If they only want to cater to professional studios, not to ordinary artists or small studios, that's up to them. But They havnt decided that (yet?).

To an extent I think they have made that decision, and that's the real reason for the absent upgrade path (and why you aren't getting a straight answer). It seems to me that eon would really like to associate their product with major pro studios - as high end apps such as Max, Maya, etc. are. Their link with ILM was obviously very successful for them. The problem they have is that before the link with ILM, Vue was seen as a hobbyist app. This puts it in the same camp as, say, Poser - not highly regarded by pro studios (and the ability to import Poser scenes probably didn't help, reinforcing that hobbyist feel).

To get away from that hobbyist label, the obvious approach is to have one line for the pros and one for everyone else. Sure, they'll sell anyone the top-of-the-range version if you have the money. But it may be that they've taken a decision that v7complete is for hobbyists and v7infinite is for pros, and to allow upgrades from one to the other is blurring that distinction.

I'm not sure I agree with the thinking behind that, and I do feel that you should be able to upgrade in the way you want, but eon's long term plans are not known to us, and this may be the way they've decided to go. If so, look for even higher upgrade prices for v7i to v8i (and will there be a path for v7 complete to v8i?) and maybe the dropping of features unwanted by the pros, particularly Poser support, which must be quite an additional development burden anyway.

Steve