As I said, part of the beauty of starting and running ones own company is you don’t have to follow what the industry does, or what you “should” do.
People seem to love that FAS isn’t like other companies in most regards. Other brands put out an update once or twice a year. FAS is great because they have steady updates, etc etc. Then at the same time, we complain FAS doesn’t do soemthing L6, Boss etc does.....
Do we want them to just follow what the industry does, or do their own thing ?
We bought it because it’s not L6, but we’d still like them to copy just the specific things l6 does that we like ?
You're not wrong. It just seems odd and arbitrary to draw the line here, given the obvious demand.
This, of course, calls into question whether or not customers "deserve" the various updates. I see this on the Helix forums all the time; someone complains about the dearth of content in an update and they're immediately met with a chorus of how grateful they should be yadda yadda yadda. Well, for me, I expect that. To me, that's part of what makes the price worth it; the longevity, content updates, support, etc. So it's perfectly reasonable to be dissatisfied with an update. We aren't poor beggars groveling at the heels of these companies begging for table scraps. We're paying customers and part of that price was the expectation that new models would be eventually added and things improved and supported. Now, if I bought a Pod 2.0 Bean, then might be out of line to expect continued support.
And frankly, there's been very little in the last umpteen updates in the Axe III that have at all affected anything about the way I do business. I'm sure a lot of the features and tweaks have made many people happy, but every time I read the release notes, it's pretty unremarkable - but again, that's because I'm a meat and potatoes kinda player. I don't care about multiplexers and floor reflections in cabs and adding LFOs to whatever (see, I don't even have the language to use hyperbole lol!).
And you're right - we don't want them to copy the things Line 6 does - we want them to do it better! Like my idea as mentioned above: why not knock us all dead with the "MultiClon" an OD model that captures the characteristics of various Klons and klones it could even have an option to have an effect on pedals down the line (as was mentioned earlier as one of the Klon's charms). Bam. Already better than Line 6 and better than incorporating outboard pedals. Many of us didn't buy this "because it's not Line 6"; in fact many of us have the Helix as well. I bought it as the perfect all-in-one gigging solution that is cream of the crop and state of the art in modeling - and because I knew of Cliff's reputation for incorporating his customers' requests. Granted, before I became a FAS user, I heard MANY terrible things about these forums, but as of yet I have yet to experience that, thankfully
I appreciate the discussion. This is all very interesting to me.