I agree with most of these comments, I do not blame the software but yes I think TANE should had thier service pack 2 out before TMR17 it will look and feel better for Trainz users.
Stay with TANE and wait, as TMR17 as been quickly released this year with problems
The codebase is the same. What you see in TMR17 is the basis of what is in SP2, which is currently in closed beta testing. There are similarities but a lot of differences which I can't disclose.
Again this subject has come up before, and I'm not sure if you'll understand product development and product support. In the software development environment or SDE for short, there are two forks setup. It works this way and typical of most industries, by the way. The R&D group will develop a product which will be tested then sold. Once that product is out in the market, the development group continues to work on new products while a support group continues to work on underlying issues which were not caught during development by the testers, but reported by the customers. This is where the service packs and hotfixes come in. Hotfixes, or patches as some companies call them, are interim updates to address bugs found by the test group and customers. Once these bugs are fixed and HFs released, the company will eventually release a Service Pack to upgrade the program further. Usually, not always, a Service Pack will roll up all the previous hot fixes to a single upgrade so the past patching is not necessary.
The reason for this is simple. If companies, N3V included, waited until every bug was ever worked out of their software product, or any product for that matter, then nothing would ever be sold and the companies would go bankrupt. You see they have to keep looking forward while supporting the past to a certain extent so they can pay their workers, pay the rent on the office, keep the lights, on and pay other things.
With this in mind, companies like N3V now take things one step further. Instead of making a custom product with each development cycle, they will use parts of what they had before for another product - a branch off the trunk mind you. This means that with the basic T:ANE product in place other products such as TMR17, T:ANE 2 (The next version?), or whatever else they can come up with based on the same parts, can be developed easier, faster, and with better quality. This is where the SPs are at the moment. They are addressing and rolling up hot fixes to a single package from which other products can be produced. There's an explanation about this in the current Trainz Newsletter if you subscribe to that.