Fender Studio Pro 8 Released

[BONES]

Your right, Fender ownership is actually Presonus. Presonus sold it to and Fender/ Presonus , and then bought it from themself and are working under cover posing as Fender.
Thanks for letting me know how this all works, I'm so stupid I couldn't tell.

Clearly you can't. When Fender bought the company, they didn't go through and sack everyone who was working for Presonus and replace them with Fender people. They bought the company because it is a successful company they think they can make money from. The last thing they are going to do is interfere with that unless they see a need to. The people who might have lost their jobs after the acquisition are people whose roles are duplicated - payroll, human resources, sales and marketing - you don't f**k with the people who are actually making you money.

I was working for Autodesk when they acquired Alias Wavefront, the company that created Maya, and do you know how many people they sacked from Alias Wavefront? Zero. Even when they acquired SoftImage a few years later and killed off the product, they still kept most of the developers on to integrate the SoftImage technology into other products.

In this case, Fender probably weren't even interested in the software side of the business and as long as it's not costing them money, they 're probably happy to stay completely hands-off with it. That's how it works and it's obvious by now that the way Studio One was going hasn't changed at all since the name change and new branding, has it? I'd bet a week's pay that it's still al the same people in charge of development and all the same people doing the work and you making a plea to Fender isn't even going to register and if anyone notices, they'd just laugh at you.

I had no issue paying, when they actually worked on the core functionality of the software. The last couple years, there's a pattern of abandoning older functionality and instead adding third party add-ons that cost money, or require a subscription.

What have they abandoned? Everything that I was using 5 years ago still works. The only thing they screwed me over with was discontinuing Studio One Artist but it made no real difference to me, it was just the principle of not paying for things I didn't want or need.

They also do nothing to help in editting, or mixing.

Editing what? They have made significant "improvements" to mixing in recent releases. Off the top of my head they made improvements to panning in v7 and added the Channel Overview in v8. You could also argue that new/updated effects are improvements for mixing.

Add to that, development has drastically slowed down.

Could you? I don't see it and even if it is the case, that's what happens as a product matures. You don't fix something that isn't broken and I'd argue that at least some of the stuff that gets done is done purely because they promise us regular updates, not because anyone actually needs any of that shit. e.g. I've not so much as looked at all the extra instruments we have access to now, I haven't touched the supposedly wonderful new reverb and I'll never use either of the new views they obviously put quite a bit of effort into for v8.

You could pay for a year and barely have a single update of merit.

That's true of every piece of software that's been around for more than a few years that I can think of. Maybe Bitwig is a bit of an exception but that's a much newer product than Studio One and I think they are still trying to work out what they want it to be.