I especially logged in again in this forum because of your post. Your analysis is spot on and the general feeling a big part of Xojo users seem to have.
I remember, about 5 years ago, I raised hell at the office protecting this tool against my colleagues who had lost faith in it and was really angry when I lost that fight. Now looking back and seeing the ongoing decay, I’m 100% sure this was the best decision our company has made.
In RealBasic times, it was the very best in making cross platform desktop applications. RB/Xojo was an expert in it. Not so much with the other platforms added. iOS is a gimmick, Web 1.0 never took off (and let us hope Web 2.0 does not follow the same path) and Android is way to late to the party. But the worst part of all of it is indeed, as you stated, not to be able to deliver a stable version in almost a decade, even for the platforms they once excelled in. The tool is in constant Beta and that way you can’t but loose the faith of your user base. They seem to have forgotten that their users have to use it to make a living too and that the tool they make is the foundation of that.
The stubbornness of Xojo to continue walking the wrong path, ignoring posts like yours (and mine back in the time, as this is nothing new) who try to see them the light (again) is staggering! I’ve never seen a tool so not listening to their user base. They are not Apple, who can do that as the world just needs to follow their decisions, even if they seem wrong. Nor are they, as you say, a startup who can be forgiven its first steps into developing programming tools. Xojo should be more than mature enough by now to make state-of-the-art, robust and virtually bug free software. Other tools can, and in much shorter time span so why can’t Xojo?
Xojo may praise itself very, very lucky they have some users who write plugins, bug workarounds and language extensions to elevate their tool above a toy language. But I have seen many of them leave the tool, just giving up. I was fortunate to encounter some of them again recently and you still feel a lot of love for the Xojo tool, but with a sense of remembering a faded glory.
It pains me that posts like yours have to come up on this forum all the time. But I’m afraid you are fighting a losing battle. Xojo has a high tolerance against being kicked in the b*utt to redeem themselves. The Xojo engineers are very hard working people, I am sure of that. But there is only so much a human being can do, not given the much needed resources. No clear skies ahead for Xojo I’m afraid…