My guess is that the programming team was told to focus on code while the people that could not even comprehend the product, named it, and sold it. [/b]
probably worse than that. the marketing guys are telling the product quality guys that the should tell the product development guys that they should tell the programmers to build a "drum tightness sampler with ABF export" only because AKAI seems to be developing something similar and withouth knowing what it is, but then they complain when the developers dont build it perfectly after the marketing idiots (missing) vision.
and at the same time all the cool things the progammers already have built are killed by decisions of those product quality monks.
if you want to get an idea about how this works at steinberg and many other companies you only have to look at the range of plug-ins coming with the various cubase versions. there is absolutely no concept visible, things come and go, the light version comes after the pro version, the new version looks like the old version while another plug-in still does the same but has been renamed and redesigned ... a complete mess.
you have seen what happened to the solaris platform, and you have seen that it took 12 years until the wavelab editor came to mac. you have seen all the different versions of TDM supporting cubases - at exhibitions - but never in stores.
did you know that steinberg once sold a program called "remix" which was a downgraded ableton live 4.0? no person with an IQ of over 30 would have made such decisions. it must have been the quality managment.
some of the best products on earth (like ermm ... the koblo tokyo runtime?) disappered because of this capitalism crap.