Well, it is balance where the developer makes the choice between implementing bugfixes in older software or continue developing new stuff and you willing to invest into that.
I don’t mind programs having minory bugs, but i personally don’t favor policies where a publishers allows final editions of programs to exist which contain “well known bugs” that includes crashes, undesired mockup of your projects or total loss of (part of) your projects. Specially not in the case when you cannot have these issues and complain about it, the developer simply tells you to upgrade because the newer edition has all the critical issues resolved.
A final program should be workable for 98%. Harmless bugs may be annoying but i learned that as a user you can either figure out ways to avoid the problem or learn how to deal with it or even use such bugs to your advantage.
I think this description is good for the Kontakt/Kompakt 1.x series, which was indeed quite buggy. When 2.0 came out, it was also quite buggy, but those bugs were fixed completely (at least for me) when 2.2.1 was released, and I didn’t have to pay for the in-between upgrades.
Even Renoise has been in the situation of deciding if it was better to fix some issues only in a new version or keep on upgrading the old one; lots of times, the second option is not a good idea for reasons you can easily imagine. A good compromise could be offering upgrades to existing customers with very interesting prices. NI at that time offered good upgrade prices so I made the deal, but I did not make it for 3.0 until they offered a 50% discount on the upgrade fee (which I think it happened because 3.0 was really not worth the price and a 3.0 numbering at all, as 2.5 would have been quite more honest). Of course Renoise offered upgrades for free thanks to the +1.0 version licensing policy.
I doubted to upgrade to the Play edition when i could upgrade the Gold edition to Play gold for 70 euro’s to find out in time the library would be replaced by 16 bit samples. The iLok protection also was a complete turn off.
I’m not following you. Do you mean that EWQLSO Gold has 24bit samples, while PLAY SO Gold has 16bit samples? As far as I know, nothing changed, in the sense that Gold Edition has always been 16 bit in both EWQL and PLAY editions, while the only 24 bit edition is the Platinum in both versions