superfabulous, Im happy that your happy, but id like to put some ballance on some points.
First thing is Pixologics efforts to produce the best sclupting app is by far the best iv seen for dedication on inovative design, and progression. There are different people that use Zbrush which will give different opinions due to the fact that Zbrushes short falls will effect some more than others.
Its hard to cover all levels of usage, but here are some exsamples.
Hobbyest: Some more seriouse than others, either way it dont matter as its fun, its being creative, and expressing ones self.
Artest: Again a range of these people are out there, some take this very seriously, others like to play with virtual clay.
The Professional: We have the freelance, and the employed studio artest. The employed studio artest has a host of other tools at hand to get the job done. In either case money is involved, there are dead lines, and the pressure is on.
When a problem comes up, you either skip around it, try a workaround, or re-think about the application your using. Either way you have to move forward. Some dont even need half the features that are in Zbrush, so they may not even hit Zbrushes short commings, or broken tools. Others may just use Zbrush by itself, but again it dont mean they are on dead lines, need all the features.
If you have a few very expansive apps at hand to aid in your workaround, then there is no issues, just a few groans because workflow is slowed down a bit.
If you rely on some core features of Zbrush that simply dont work, and there is no workaround that is reasonable, then the groans become complaints.
I guess what im saying here is yes Pixologic has gave some free upgrades, yes the new features are great, if you need them, but what if you have been waiting for some major feature to be fixed, and it still remains? What if you had plans to use Zbrush in your pipeline, and suddenly a feature just simply dont work?
What if Zbrush crashes every few mins, what if Zbrush was promissed to be delivered, and was delayed years, months? This is where you mite see the lack of gratitude.
Im thankfull myself, to have such a great tool, and a company that actualy cares about their product. This dont mean that there is no show stopers for me. In fact there are some things that dont just slow me down, but completly hinder some features like no smooth Uvs for textures. No multiple texture zones without distortion which wasnt in v3.1.
Yes, id rather have all core features working first, than add more to my pallet. We can all look in the top row and see how tallented these individuals are, but we must understand that the new features only enhanced their result, they could use Zbrush 2.0 and produce top row quality, because they did.
The mac users look forward to actualy getting 3.5 /4, the Pc users look forward to the fixes in 3.5, and v4 for Goz.