however a large scale BOYCOTT would go much further; only the user would need be specific about WHY they were boycotting buying the new product and NOT buying into the subscription plan...THEN it might do some good in terms of changing the product, and the marketing method they use
It seems to me that Autodesk has actually been changing the product. It just takes a long time, since first you have to actually convince them that something is a problem. Then, once you do that, for all but the most critical things, it generally takes another three years before that input actually is reflected in the product. And of course, Autodesk's first attempt at a new feature is often unusable, so you often have to wait another year or two before the feature really gets usable.
So it takes patience. Unfortunately, since you have to wait 3-5 years to see the results of your input, you don't know if Autodesk is actually working on an improvement or not. All we can do from a user perspective is give them as much feedback as we can (given time limitations, since we are not paid to test Autodesk's software), and then wait and see what we get in the next release.
In my experience, C3D has actually been improving quite a bit with each release. The best thing about 2010 is the relatively small number of new problems - in this regard, Autodesk did much better than in previous years. It's still got its issues, but my head is still ringing from that terrible 2007 release... To me, it seems like they're doing much better now than they were doing a few years ago. I find the improvement heartening, as long as it continues. At least, I hope it isn't just a quirk, or my imagination.
Now, the Map thing is something of a mess, and I know you've been complaining about that for at least five years now. Unfortunately, I think Autodesk may have designed themselves into a corner there. I think their problem is related to the way they built C3D and LDD on top of Map. This may have been a good idea with Land Desktop, but it doesn't work well at all with Civil 3D. Unfortunately, they built a lot of things around that architecture before they realized they were creating a problem. I don't know enough about the internal architecture to say if there's any good solution to the problem they have now, but from what I know, it looks pretty hairy.
