It is interesting. Reading the posts comparing TRS19 with TRS22 with the authors preferring TRS19 (a perfectly valid opinion) I am reminded of posts a few years ago comparing T:ANE with TRS19 and the authors preferring T:ANE for often the same reasons - less "buggy", more stable.
TRS22 is currently in SP2 and the latest release of TRS19 is SP5. While I have no dates available to me it would not surprise me to learn that when TRS19 was at a similar level of development (SP2) T:ANE was in its final SP release.
Who could forget, from those of us who were around at the time, the "disaster" that was the initial release of T:ANE? Bug Central (or similar) as I recall some calling it at the time. The forum flames were legendary (or just became so with the passage of time) with many posters swearing that they will delete T:ANE and stick with TS12.
The point is that any new software release will have many issues (there is no such thing as "bug free" software) and it can take a few years before it becomes stable enough for some users to consider it worth buying - which is a perfectly valid viewpoint. During that "running in" period those of us who have taken the leap of faith and bought in early have had the opportunity of learning the new features (e.g. Surveyor 2.0) and will have a head start on those who waited.
Me? I just like the adventure of trying the new with all the risks that can sometimes carry with it. Trainz is, after all, just a game (please no angry posts on that).
The T:ANE release was pure hell and N3V learned a lot from that. The product was released way too soon, I'm assuming due to contractual agreements with the publisher they had, and we got stuck with a nearly useless product. At one point, we couldn't even edit a route without a CTD and DBRs were a daily occurrence. As a moderator at the time, I was constantly stressed by the to be unnamed users who were purely rude and went as far as personally emailing and attacking people including myself. It was then that I retired from that and let someone else take over. My health was far more important than Trainz!
Finally, after a hotfix we got SP1 that was okay but very unstable and SP2 was better but introduced whacky AI. The final service pack straightened things out but T:ANE was never finished and we moved on to TRS19.
TRS19 was the best release. The initial release was nice. The program had the performance of T:ANE with new graphics. The AI behaved pretty well and everything seemed to work. As the service packs moved in, I noticed a dramatic drop in performance and the AI became whacky. It's too bad that people have to "fix" something that works well. TRS19 in all honesty is what T:ANE should have been when that was released.
TRS22/PE/PLUS fixed the performance issues introduced into TRS19. The AI also acted a bit better but other quirks have been introduced such as bugs with update/replace assets, lighting and texturing issues. The biggest bug currently worth mentioning is the AI bug where the drivers now back up randomly, skip stations, and do other annoying things worse than normal. The good news is the current beta, still in testing, has fixed those issues but has sadly broken scripts for important assets such as TRC level crossing control and other important components in the program.
While I included Plus in with TRS22 and TRS22 PE, it's actually a different product based on the same game engine. Plus users have access to beta testing of future features that will eventually, well mostly but not always into newer versions of Trainz. Multiplayer Surveyor (MPS) is one of them. The other feature which is now bog-standard in TRS22 versions is the Universal Driver Surveyor (UDS) that allows users to sort of, well kind of mostly with caveats, jump between Surveyor and Driver easily. This feature has proven to be a useful tool for route development and testing and replaces the old Quick-Drive which was cumbersome. In addition, Plus initially saw the Surveyor 2.0 (S20) and the new HD terrain. These are still in development with many new features being added with nearly every version upgrade.
