[…]blaming the user for what is clearly a bug. Maybe it's poor wording.
Nobody is "blaming".
From hard-lessons-learned experience, the comments are saying that it's possible to set up a situation where the system will create sound completely different from what we expected. It's "pilot error", it's "mea culpa", it's "hey, I f*cked up", it's not a death sentence, it's not a big deal, we get to make mistakes. And, we, in the community, get to help people isolate the problem and adjust the setting, or, if, after others with more experience agree there's an issue, we mark it as a bug, along with the information so it's reproducible, and pass it to Fractal. That's how the community works.
That the system made undesirable sound or locked up is NOT a clear sign that there is a bug, especially if it happened after the user adjusted something in their own preset. If EVERY preset did it it would point at the system, or a very stubborn, determined, user. "With great power comes great responsibility" the saying goes. Fractal isn't about to protect us from ourselves, nor should they. They have put in an extremely flexible and powerful firmware, but we can do things that cause it to make bad sounds, lock up, or be unresponsive.
I can make my system go berserk by adding two blocks and connecting them. Should Fractal take away that ability? Absolutely not, because the blocks are extremely useful, and I was careless. I can make it generate terrible screaming sounds. How do I know? I did it. I can also take it to the very edge of that and get the sound I was after because I learned what not to do. I don't want the system stepping in and telling me what I can't do unless I'm going to physically damage it, and we're assured there are safeguards in place to keep that from happening because these systems are over-engineered that way. Several times I thought I'd broken my FM3 after pushing it well over the edge, had to power it off, and when I powered it on it was fine, I could start at the previous save, screw it up again, ad infinitum, until I learned my lesson or got it to work.
You really shouldn't have to constantly back up your preset as you're building it in case it craps out. Other modelers don't require that, they just work.
"Other modelers" don't allow access to the low-level settings we have, nor do they offer the tools to make it possible to incrementally save and roll forward and back through them. It's basically a simple revision control system similar to what developers have used for years and years, and which has proven to be extremely useful when building and debugging code, or in our case, presets. People overlook the feature regularly, or fail to understand how to use it; I was a programmer for a long time and it's intuitive to me to take advantage of it. Fractal doesn't "require" it, they offer it because it's extremely useful. That other companies don't offer it is not a sign that Fractal doesn't care or is buggy or is forcing us to use it, it's the opposite, they're being thoughtful, helpful and friendly, thinking ahead to supply what will be useful to us.
Are Fractal's products perfect? Ha, no. But the bugs are usually pretty deep and subtle, and they own up when it was a bug, and announce it in the release notes for a revision. But, again, more times than not, it turns out that the user did something that precipitated the situation. And, if possible, at that point Fractal will put in something that keeps it from going beyond the point of no return unless that would impact other features or the flexibility used by other people… for
instance and
this. The Fractal team occasionally discuss the tradeoffs and what led to design choices in comments they make, and providing power and maintaining flexibility wins out the majority of the time.
Perhaps Fractal needs a "training wheels" mode so the system acts like other modelers. Most likely that would open up an entirely different can of worms and lead to conversations about how dumb the Fractal ecology is and why spend that much money when some other modeler can do it for a lot less?
