vince...
frankly lots of the bloated modern gui's turn me off.
this whole phenomena is cos lots of youngsters grew
up on playing games on games systems in the past 2 decades.
what a lot of people dont understand is flashy gui's come at a cost also.
heres what i wrote to another poster.., to save me retyping.

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now lets turn to the gui itself.
on this one imho pg are on a hiding to nothing imho.
ive used some of the flashy gui's in music daw software n fancy shmancy stuff.
as well you know, there is overhead with every bit of source code.
more features..result in more source code.
and frankly some of the new fancy gui's can be problematic on
earlier clunky pc's with old OS versions.
what i perceive is good old pg have tried to make it so the products will
not only work on the latest uber power pc's but also older pc's because
not everyone can afford a new i7 with all the bells n whistles.
the other problem is if pg redesign the gui..lots of long time users
might not like it cos they are used to it.
ah ah !! i hear some people say. so offer an option..new style and old style.
heck lets even let the user configure the gui anyway their hearts desire.
why not go the whole hog and include a gui generator just like one might find in
a programmers compiler.
BUT THAT POSES ANOTHER PROBLEM.
more source code and more bloat being but one problem.
and more maintenance of source code.
as i said pg are on a hiding to nothing.
this is one of the problems one encounters as a developer trying to keep
as many people in the world happy as possible.
ive been there done that with user bases myself many times in the past.
and the conclusion i came up with is ..
you can never keep everyone happy.

dont even get me started on programming on the pc mate, and the fact if one uses
cetain C++ compilers one has to deal with lovely big run times.
why werent the compilers designed to create stand alone executables ??
instead of needing big run times ??
(eg like purebasic.com with in line assembler).
someone can correct me if i'm wrong but its my understanding pg used
borland compilers in the past because with those no big run time
was needed. a logical choice imho at the time.

in summary your post is critical of certain pg aspects..
but in many respects dont you think many of those aspects
are a result of design and programmer tool decisions made way back in the development of win
itself ??
some people like the mac os. me i'm this way and that.
i like small elegant real time OS's like menuetos.org.
(give it a gander sometime.but no music software for it)
and feel that music software developers lives could have been made
a whole lot easier over the years with a proper elegant small OS
dedicated to the music creation vertical market with easy to use
development tools and of course most importantly a extremely fast low latency os kernel
relating to audio applications .
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vince , an old saying in software engineering is ..
"mutton done up like lamb". meaning an application
that looks flashy on the surface, ..but might be hiding gremlins
under the hood so to speak.
frankly i'm always suspicious of flashy gui's for the reason above.
no matter...if people just wont take the time to read manuals,
and get stuck into an application and get down n dirty with it..
no amount of flash will help imho.
i would far sooner see pg expand the product concept
with more instrumernt types.

retired puter engr....powertracks on amd......NICE !
"what is the black art of audio engineering ?"
my silly songs...motagator.com/bmanning
see my tips in the tips section.