Maybe that's where we're different.
For the engineers, C3D is a completely different world. There have been massive improvements.
You are saying that we merely need to hunt in the nooks and crannies of C3D, and we can find many of the old Land Desktop features for survey support.
Well, shouldn't surveyors be able to expect new features in new software, too? If the engineers aren't still using 15-year-old technology, why are we expected to still use FBK files? As surveyors, we seem to be expected to simply benefit from the engineering improvements that "flow over" into Surveying, such as better surface generation, etc. Well, there's also the Survey database, but because of many decisions Autodesk made in its implementation, we have basically found we cannot really use it. So they thing they worked on the most is something we can't even use.
And I actually have found a HUGE number of things missing and/or misimplemented in C3D when it comes to Surveying. I have addressed some of the biggest gaps with the Sincpac-C3D, and am addressing more, though, so things are much better now than they were when we first tried to use C3D, and we didn't have the Sincpac-C3D.
I suppose at this point, it would actually be to my benefit if Autodesk continues to ignore Surveyors. As time goes on and I add more and more to the Sincpac-C3D, eventually I'll have a pretty high-powered add-on for C3D that addresses the lack of Survey support. It already makes a massive difference, and I've only implemented a small sliver of my ideas so far.