kerwin, nice thoughtful post. Hard to argue with much of what you said. But I would just make a couple observations.

Daz is under new management and is not necessarily going to adhere to previous schedules and strategies. They're certainly not adhering to promises made by previous management to the customer base. They're doing what they think they must do for the good of the company and it's affiliated vendors, to heck with what the previous management did or said.

By offering their most expensive product for free for a month, and then extending that for at least another month, they don't seem to be much worried about deferring software revenues ... for DS4. They're more concerned with encouraging purchases of aftermarket Genesis stuff. That is ALL this version of DS is about these days.

So I don't think it's out of the question that the new bosses at Daz might follow this giveaway (and steep discounts that will doubtless come next) by bringing out DS5 sooner than the company had done in the past. I'm not saying next week, but maybe in a few months when this promotion has exhausted itself.

They're ignoring requests for bug fixes in DS4? Well, maybe they're saving those fixes and other improvements for the next, paid version.