Personally, I don’t depend on cloud storage as it’s a constantly changing market and thus a perpetually moving target. What I depend on today suddenly stops working in the morning when yet another tech startup realizes they don’t have a way to monetize their work and thus shuts down the company and / or project. Or starts charging significant money for what was once free.
In fairness, I’ve made a living for a couple of decades as a software develooper so I’m more likely to roll my own solutions anyway. However, I realize that most people don’t have that luxury.
That said, from a pragmatic point of view I think the future is much more likely to include some kind of cloud integration in Cubase than it is to address issues that have been around for years, for one simple reason. New releases aren’t about making your existing cutomers happy. You already have their money. The only point of a new release is to get the market excited enough to spend new money. That’s what drives the decisions on which features go into a release, and it’s very, very marketing driven.
The industry term for this is making your software “100% buzzword compliant.” Give marketing something trendy that they can sell. Cloud is trendy. Therefore, it’s likely that something will be added to a new release that at the very least gives them the ability to use the word “cloud” in their marketing campaign. Programmers rarely push back on this because, like musicians, they want to play with the coolest new toys (and it enhances the resume). Is it better to make yet another tweak to a feature you already have, or add a new, trendy feature that marketing can get people excited about? From a business perspective, this is the mother of all no brainers.
Don’t mistake this for a poke at Yamaha / Steinberg. It’s not. I found a home with Cubase after trying pretty much every major DAW out there, often for extended periods, and I like it very much. I also have a number of the UR series audio interfaces as well as the CMC controllers. If I didn’t like the way they did business, I would vote with my wallet - elsewhere.
I don’t really care about cloud features one way or the other. I just think it’s likely to see them in the next year or two because it will help them sell more software. And personally, I hope they sell lots of new software. As 99.9% of Silicon Valley tech startups learn the hard way, it doesn’t matter how cool your stuff is. If you don’t make money, you go out of business. Well, at least when you can no longer find suckers, also known as venture capitalists, to live off of. When a company goes out of business, they take the software you depend on with them. No more fixes or upgrades of any kind. Game over.
As for all those things you guys have been waiting years for the fix on, good luck with that. They already have your money. I’m not saying it’s the way things outta be, merely pointing out how life in the world of professional software development works. A plan based on reality has a much greater chance of success than wishful thinking.