Well I was burned when I upgraded Gigastudio 4 and a month later it was useless.
These threads create all sorts of conspiracy theories. If they alter the new Sonar to make it less familiar with the current DAW, I'm out.
They wont. So many have dropped Waves that were not sponsored by them, Then again at the turn of the century they did another bad policy that led to people dropping them.
The worse that can happen is they are taken over and stuffed shirts will still have faith in the sub model. The problem with sub models is prices also go up.
The strong point is their plugins. Everything else Waves sucks. So far their quality overrides their crap business model. At some point hopefully that ends since there is so much out there with superior licensing.
I still use Soundforge. It seems like the Suite is a good deal since you get the Steinberg SpectraLayers Pro 10.
Too bad Waves is on my sheisse liste. I rarely buy from EP.
It's rare to see loops with this kind of licensing these days and probably wouldn't dent my top 20 producers of loops. You won't see these at vendors that specialize in selling loops.
Live Suite which includes Max is pricey even the upgrade compared to Reaper.
People pay for that stuff instead of taking time to learn it on their own.
The rationale is no different when people buy presets of any plugin.
8 versions of Reaper is about equal to Live Max upgrade.
I get the impression that archiving them and trying to install later on would not be smooth like Kontakt.
They have Originals which are very affordable so I assume that's the direction they are going.
When it comes to orchestra libraries one can only invent the wheel so far.
With the large amount of VST synths I see no need for sample based players either.