I like to believe that there is a magic level of persuasion, and people that master that get great results every time. I always try my best; most of the time I fail, but it doesn't stop me from trying again, maybe next time I'll explain better, maybe it'll come out less than 5 pages.
To be honest, just seeing this thread gives me some hope, somehow. Maybe we are not that far apart. I appreciate the insights given. I would like to share with you 2 opinions of mine, hoping that they add up to something, even if not much.
1) The combined features of MC address more needs than you as a company seems able to split your dev efforts to. Just by reading this thread it seems from outside (even if it's a possible flawed view) that your combined TO-DO lists (let alone piling ours on top of them) are bigger than what you can deliver in an acceptable time frame. Acceptable is a key word. It may be acceptable to you to finish them in 5 years it may not be to others. It seems to me that with every major iteration of MC you're trying to give something to everybody, but it's a catch up game.
I've no experience with programming (and respect those with skills, like you) or programming teams but I wonder where's the ballance? From my POV the question that comes up is: can you hire more people to develop MC? We have obviously reached the limit of requests we can ask of you on a daily basis. The only way you can deal with them it seems to raise the threashold of what is important. To whom remains a debatable item.
2) To be specific to Theater View. From my POV this is an elephant in the room (althouth I understand that not being such a priority for JRiver, our opinions differ). I personally disagree with the implementation at hand. I'm past metadata, past skinning, past navigation. I have struggled - in private - to find a way to build on what it is and give incentives to other people to do more with it. But I don't see an end game, I don't see the end benefits. You can't make something out of nothing, and the current concept was not developped far enough to alow for more features. Do you, JRiver, have an end game for Theater View?
In your thread "
Where We're Going Next" when somebody asked about Theater View being skinable the answer was (not a perfect quote) "it's skinnable for years, we just haven't seen much interest". Statements like that make me wonder if you trully understand your customer needs. Why wasn't there much interest? It's a full fledged framework and nobody wants to use it for some strange reasons? I do not believe so.
You say to not ask for huge changes and go step by step. This is where we struggle to understand each other. It's an elephant, we can't piecemeal it. If that was a viable solution we would have done in the last 3 years.
