I was not the one who brought “most users” into this, you did.
Read your post #43.
And at the same time you use “low end systems” as an argument as well. Well, what do you know? Did you conduct a survey or something? I find the way 3.1.4 (and now 3.2) is being developed and delivered very questionable,
As in what? I gave reasons, you ignored them and washed them away because you like to complain? That technical experts make decisions in product development as all over the world, in all professional products, and your opinion isn't received? (Which is, by the way, a decision you made.) That software development is not a democratic process where you replace experience and workforce by a count of noses?
Kolla, I'm a firm believer in democracy, but I'm not a firm believer that this principle carries over into product development. This is not an open source product, and it is not supposed to be. The market decides whether a product is good or bad, whether it sells or not. This is how the world works.
Don't like it? Then don't buy it. That is how the world works. I can deal with that. Actually, every company would be happy to *not* have people like you as customer. If another compromize would have been made, you, yes *you in particlar*, have had other complains. I bet.
lots of rather strange decisions are being made “behind closed doors” and that is why this very thread exists in the first place - if you cannot watch others having opinions about the project, then ignore this thread and stick to your own.
If Microsoft develops windows, those decisions are also made behind closed doors. If Apple develops ios, those decisions are also made behind closed doors. For good reason - such discussions are made between developers that understand the technical background, and that are willing to work to make something happen.
It is good industry practise not to open up everything, because if you put every detail into discussion, you would end up nowhere or a pile of incompatible stuff that does not fit together, a lot of discussions (as this one) that do not drive the process, and does not help to get anyone anywhere.
It is of course also good industry practise to listen to customer voices, which happens here. Customers, note well! But it is also good practise to ignore whiners, complainers and nay-sayers - because you are complaining out of principle, and not out of the motivation to create a better product.
You don't like the product? Well, do not buy it. This is how the world works. I believe every serious company would be happy not to have a customer like you.
What I can tell is that I have seen more than once people be confused about not being able to boot into workbench from floppies and disk images that worked well earlier, both programs and games.
I already told you. It doesn't fit, and 1MB is not an option either because that also causes incompatibilities. It is neither an option for the ECS machines. I told that about 1000 times, you wash that away - you don't want to understand the reason. Compression is not an option either because it costs in the end 512K more RAM to begin with.
Every Os development is a matter of making compromizes of some sort. 3.1.4 is not different, and 3.2 is not different either. The compromize that was made was: You going to boot from harddrive, you have a little bit more RAM (1.5MB), you have the same computing power (68K is enough). This is in good tradition to the way how the A4000T ROM was built, and in that sense nothing new. We even offered two different upgrade paths, so left choices to the customer.
The compromize being made was a much smaller one than that of 3.9. Which required more RAM, a more powerful machine, a double boot, a 68020 at minimum.
Every other decision (1MB ROM, compression) would have meant *other* compromizes, with other drawbacks. There is no silver bullet that addresses e very need, and you cannot make everybody happy. And nobody can make you happy, but we know that already, don't we?
Concerning games: Games fall into two cases: Either, it boots directly into the game, then the workbench is not needed. Case closed. Or it uses the workbench - but then it is system friendly and hence has access to the harddrive. And, woha, by pure magic, it finds the workbench, even if you boot from disk. Harddisk: Yes, that is part of the compromize.
So, in fact, the problem you claim to exist does not exist in realitiy, and I haven't heard about any user claiming that game XYZ did not run due to the decision of off-loading two ROM components (that have been off-loaded before). Except your "out of principle" whining.
Oh, just shut up...
You can perhaps count on A4000T systems having hard drives, but for a500/a600/a1200/cd32 there are plenty of people who just swap between various cf or sd cards for “hard drives” and use gotek as floppy drive. And such systems are better off with plain old 3.1 kickstart at this point, as 3.1.4 introduces a number of problems.
And yet, you can boot from disk, provided the workbench.library and icon.library are on it. So, nobody is harmed. And if those people feel more comfortable with 3.1, then so might it be. A 1MB kickstart would not fit into the ECS systems anyhow, and you cannot fit more features into the same ROM and RAM footprint. Just does not work.