Quote - Carrara 8.5 will be coming out of beta soon and it will be a paid upgrade

After this -- how many people will spring for it?

I've added DS4Pro / Bryce / Hexagon (already own it) to my cart and hit confirm.
I never pass up freebies, never know when you need/want them. :)

But yeah, something tells me they are trying to increase the user base for DS, only I already had Standard (was free when it first came out) and never even downloaded it. That's how interested I was.

I'm sure many people add and download it.

Install and use? That's a whole different ballgame.

Convert? They didn't convince me to switch before, why would I switch now? Just because it's free? To me that devalues the entire software line.

I bought DS3A. I even got suckered into buying plugins and that Dreamlight sub, thinking I might actually use them and get something out of that subscription as I had no idea how to to use the darn thing. (I actually have a lifetime sub, which I've barely used.)
It was an epic fail.
I struggled from the initial installation onwards. There was no documentation (and there still isn't) so I asked simple questions, like "Where do I install the plugins?"
I got 15 different answers, ranging from "In your Programs folder--" "Uh-uh. Let me stop you right there. NOTHING lives in "My Programs". Period." to "I am wondering about that too." None of the answers made any sense.  (What's so hard about having a "Plugins" folder? I seem to recall there is one, but apparently that's not where they are actually installed to. Or something. I still don't know.)
After failing to grasp where the heck the plugins go, we get to content. Well hey, guess what? No one could give me a straight answer of what goes where and how in the heck I can install content to Poser without having to put the DS stuff into my Poser runtime as well. (Not.Gonna.Happen.Thanks.) I'm not about to install it twice, just to keep DS happy.
Then they went from having DS only and Poser only installers, to combining them. ARGH. Then they did it for some, but not for others. I just made no sense.
So why in the name of all that's holy would I want to go through all that AGAIN?
First and foremost, I want documentation that tells me stuff like that. Call me old fashioned, but I like a big fat manual. (Poser Pro 2012 is what? 900 pages long? Plus a 200+ page Python manual?)
How can you claim you're setting new industry standards if you can't even produce a manual to go with this "Professional" software?
I don't know about anyone else, but I don't have a single piece of software on my system - bought or free - that didn't come with some kind of "This is how you use it" document.
Daz just pointed me to an out of date, for the most part user maintained, wiki. A WIKI. You think I want to go online every time I get stuck, and then find the solution I find is for a version that's been outdated for the past 8 months and has since had a significant rewrite?
A Pro version isn't an eternal beta version. And that's why I won't use it. Not even for free. As far as I'm concerned, DS is a beta. Always has been.
(And I resent the fact that I ended up redownloading and reinstalling DS3A every few months, and it got worse on my machine with every incremental "fix", until it stopped working altogether.)

I've tried and I failed. Not going to try again, even for free.

Silke