A potential stopgap would be to have a "special edition" that reverted the UI changes, but kept the API/SDK changes. We'd still have broken 3rd party tools (OpenCL isn't coming back) and a lot of outstanding bugs in 1st party tools, but at least that's the only issue users would have.
I have a production going on right now that we can't use 16 for because of bugs in the GUI that are not going to be fixed (quadbuffer and audio related). And for other productions we can't get enough testing done in 16 because the GUI is so detrimental to efficiency. A lot of our macros and plugins rely on GUI controls that don't even exist anymore and others that do not work as expected.
If we could run the old GUI with the new tools, we could at least justify converting the OpenCL tools to DCTL and building plugins for the new SDK. Furthermore, we could test the new internal image processing, scripting, and caching changes on actual production work.
Unfortunately, we're caught in the same trap that we were with Resolve 15, where the new Fusion GUI was the major barrier to testing and use.
Ideally, the GUI would have been feature locked and the underlying changes to the image processing code would have been priority and the new tools would have been given proper attention (did anyone notice the new tools? They have major issues, but no one is discussing them because they're such low priority). Then a followup release would have locked the tools and changes to the GUI would have been the priority. Doing everything concurrently was, in retrospect, too ambitious, but based on what we saw with the Resolve 15 development, potentially predictable.
Frank Engel wrote:If the two versions have different UIs they need to maintain two full sets of training materials, where if they use a common UI, only the differences between them need to be accounted for.
The problem is BMD says the GUI isn't complete and that changes are coming. So they either don't make training materials for 16, knowing they will be obsolete soon, or they have to redo them for each iteration of the GUI changes.
Or... They could make the training materials procedural through scripting and update them automatically for each GUI update or language.