I agree on better scaling, user choices of fonts/colors, etc…cosmetics need to be adjustable…some folks sit inches from their monitors, others sit many feet away. Some need dark skins to cut down on glare or excessive light bleeding (I.E. an open mid-theatre setup with audience sitting behind you). Others need bright and glaring GUIs where various things can be highlighted and drawn into focus (collaborative sessions). A good GUI allows us to tweak to need.
There’s rarely any objection on adding fresh new ‘options’ and features that engineers can begin adding to their current work-flow.
Any talk of ‘scrapping things’ and ‘starting over’ will just keep bigger studios locked to older versions for longer periods of time. Heck, if it’s a really radical change they’d might as well also start considering competing DAWs, because they’re going to have to redesign the entire work-flow (how all the remote controls on all their consoles are implemented) and retrain everyone on it anyway.
If all the old macros/remotes/etc. are still compatible with the ‘new and improved’ GUI, then it’s not as much of a problem. If it’s drastically different, and none of the old key-combos/macros/etc. work anymore, then they can’t use it without months of adapting and changing their entire ‘system’ work-flow.
In our little home studios we work with a few tracks and plugins at a time. It’s no big deal to go through opening and closing them one by one, or bothering with which window tops what others, etc.
Big studios take advantage of all the goodies that home users rarely ever look at. They don’t have time to open plug ins one by one, or grab a mouse and go across 5 screens to click the X on a plugin to close it. They need solutions to open and close GOBS of them with a single command. Push a button, or stomp a switch, and they have it…stomp it again, and it’s gone. Simple, predictable, reliable, and easy to set up a “Remote Device” for. CuBase can currently do this and more. It is one of the reasons why those are ‘toggle’ on/off type icons.
Home users can also take advantage of logic editors, macros, and remote controls. It’s not hard to plan out a really nice work-flow for yourself before you start a project, and tweak that as needed to get instant access to the plugins you need when you need them. Even with nothing more than a single fairly modest MIDI Keyboard controller. A few will listen when pros offer to share tips and start explaining how they’ve been managing dozens, or even hundreds of tracks and plugins in REAL TIME mixing/recording situations (along with monitoring systems for the musicians) without a problem, but then the forum crashers start complaining, “But DAWs X, Y, and Z do it this way!” instead of learning how to make CuBase do what they want TODAY.
Again, there’s nothing wrong with adding enhancements for different types of users in mind. There is nothing wrong with ‘progress’. It’s just important to maintain backwards comparability for as long as possible. If the change is ‘too radical’ and at the ‘wrong time’, then you’ve mostly discouraged big players from taking on your upgrades without more strongly considering competing options in the process. If three full time system engineers have to start over from scratch setting everything up and designing a work-flow…they’d might as well go ahead and look at ALL the DAWs on the market when it’s time to ‘be progressive’. If having a full time union guy come in and spend a week fixing ‘one little glitch’ that an update/upgrade caused in the studio test-bed…they’re more likely to post-pone upgrading at all…many successive postponements like this in a row means when they do make a move, it’ll eventually be a big one, and maybe toward some ‘other competing’ system. So not only would you miss the revenue from their ‘upgrades’, you might also lose them totally to a new competitor when they finally get around to ‘making a move’.