This would be wonderful in an ideal world. If N3V had billions of clams in its bank account with a bevy of programmers that rival the numbers working at Oracle and Microsoft, then maybe they could put the software through a lengthy QA test that lasts for years prior to release.
Back in the olden days, and I mean the 70s, this was the way software was written. Programs weren't written for public consumption and were written for specific systems. There were some software packages available such as General Ledger and other accounting packages, but they were written in-house by the company that created the hardware but this usually wasn't the case, and it was up to the customer to write programs in-house for their very expensive systems they purchased.
Then the consumer market opened up and consumers wanted products quickly. The development cycle had to change in order to accommodate the changes in the market and this development cycle has gotten shorter and shorter with more corners cut in order to keep up with the ever- demanding public.
To make matters worse, it's no longer private companies that run the show. There are big venture capitalists calling the cards now and put pressures on companies to come up with products faster while cutting corners to maximize their profitability, meaning let's cut the workforce to the barest minimum while working whoever's left to the bone and offshore any other work at the same time. It doesn't help that the program is developed by various groups working on code without really seeing what the product does. This is done mostly to prevent software piracy by preventing the contract developers from seeing all the parts together.
Because of this fierce competition, companies no longer go through the lengthy QA cycle before releasing products and instead use tools to check the code for errors. The code may be semantically correct, but that doesn't mean that it always works as intended.
Once the program is together, it's tested for the barest amount of time before the public does the testing. As I said before, being up to the public to test is well and good at the end prior to release but not so good during early development because there are so many bugs. Being up to the public means there's still going to be a small core of real testers while the rest buy into the early releases with zero interest in testing.
If the product doesn't crash to the desktop the majority of the time, it's released to the public. This is when the bugs appear because so few tested the software in the first place.
During this phase, the developers are sent off to a new project while the QA Team takes over. Tech support takes in the bug reports and QA validates them before sending them back to the developers for fixes. If it warrants, a hotfix and service pack or two is released to address immediate bugs.
In the meantime, the development team addresses a few bugs and throws more energy into new fancy features and the cycle continues.
The thing is, it's not just N3V that's caught in this cycle and business model. Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, especially Adobe, and so many other developers. A classic example of this mess came out of Colossal Order with their new Cities Skylines 2. They were forced to rush the product to market by Paradox and its investors. This caused what may have been a stellar release to go completely flat causing much bad publicity and a tarnished reputation.
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