Heres the thing.
N3V caters to a very specific audience, who generally fawn over whatever they come out with. Trainz is a unique program. No other sim has the same functionality, content, game play, etc. As such, N3V can release stuff like T:ANE, an unoptimized mess which was released as terrible, got worse, got better, then worse, then awful.
Because N3V has such a large stake in this market, they can pretty much release anything they want and do what they want with the sim. Do they wanna make it great and add all these features? Sure. Will they. I don't know, depends on how much money they can make off of us by doing that thing.
Just my 2 cents as someone who has been with this game for 10 years since I was in 1st grade.
Not necessarily. If they worked that way, they wouldn't be in business. Think about it. It does take money to make a product, thus, the sales and they are a business and pay rent, employees, taxes, utilities and everything else.
It's a bit more complex than you think... When TRS2006 and TRS2009 came out, Auran was flailing about and going under. That Fury thing killed them as it sucked out the resources they badly needed for their Trainz products. This sunk the company, and when N3V took over, they continued on selling the older products until they could get on their feet again. The newer product then was TRS2009 and that lead to TS2010 and eventually TS12. Even then like the others, TS12 was still a product of the very past. It's underlying code dated back to the mid-2000's and before. There are parts in that code that dates back to TRS2004 days, aka ca. 2003 or a bit before. With many iterations and versions in between, it had seen many updates and changes, but it was still the same technology based on the Jet Engine.
By the time 2013 came along, computer and operating system technology changed. Things were no longer in the 32-bit world any longer and moving ahead to better faster things with bigger and faster processors and video cards. With TS12 being a 32-bit application, it had limitations that kept it in the past, and it was at a point in its life where no matter how much Bondo, tape, and glue you put on the old car it ain't gonna hold together any longer. There were many things that they wanted to do, but couldn't due to the limitations of the Jet Engine that was being used along with this 32-bit technology.
The Jet Engine, developed originally by Auran, was already 10 year's old when TS12 came out and definitely showing its limitations. There was an update at some point, but then that still made the engine about 7 years old by then. With the age of the game engine plus the older code in TS12, fixing or updating things, such as moving it on to 64-bit as we have with T:ANE and TRS19 would be impossible. There were also code libraries and such that were not compatible, such as the Speed Trees from IDV, and some other code libraries from Microsoft that would need replacing without any backward compatibility, and there were most likely some licensing reasons as well meaning they bought the 32-bit versions, therefore, they couldn't cross over directly to the 64-bit version for free.
Facing this issue, they had no choice but to develop a product from the ground up. A search was done to explore commercial game engines, but none were found to be suitable so their own new game engine was built and that's what's used today. TRS19 (TRS 2019 if you wish) is based on the underlying code used in T:ANE, however, it's taking the program further.
Yes. They made mistakes when releasing T:ANE. There are many reasons why that only Tony and the crew know. They know they made these mistakes and have learned from them. The current releases are done at a different pace and in a different fashion. Service packs aren't rushed out the door as they were in the past and then require 4 hot fixes to make them sort of work. They work quite well now right out of the gate. Testing methods are different and there are other controls in place.
The thing is our wish-list, if we want to call it that, costs a lot of money to implement. I think Tony said that each item on the list cost $30 million AD to produce, or $20,520,836 USD. That's a lot of money for a single thing that we would like in our simulator. Just imagine what the complete package would cost to finish up. Do you have a hefty Powerball winning ticket to cash in? This is why they choose carefully those things that please the majority of the folks and not on some of the more esoteric things we might want. Sure I would love to see all those things implemented and then some, but being the realist I am, I know it's not going to happen and I'm happy to have what we've got.