I understand there are a lot of personal feelings going around here. That seems common in the Amiga community, and especially when hot heads collide where everyone has their own idea of how Amiga should move forward.
This is a typical chicken and egg syndrome. However, in this case I think they are clearly making the right choice. If they focused on developer-centric features first, users would be less interested in purchasing and developers would say "why should I develop for this when there are no users?"
In this case there are clear benefits to buying a Vampire WITHOUT many developers getting involved. Yes, if you have an 060 setup and are happy with it this may not be the product for you - but you are in the clear minority. Vampire offers a clear benefit for anyone without an 060 looking for a CPU upgrade, along with RTG and many other features. Just with existing software. Would new software be nice? Yes, and software is trickling in.
But they are selling tons so why switch priorities now?
Once they finish adding all the consumer-centric features they'd like I assume they'll switch to developer-centric features. By then developers will have a nice target audience to develop for.
And I'm sure this product is not of interest to the demo scene. They are most interested in retro hardware, and this makes the Amiga less retro.
They are a small team and can't do everything at once!
Hear here! I was an active member of the Vampire team for a while and got to try a Vampire 500 prototype for a while. I hope to get one of my own. I never owned a graphics card for a Classic Amiga nor a fast accelerator. Having those avenues open to me was a new experience for me.
As for PowerPC, by the time the quirks were worked out of OS4, my MicroA1 was not worth upgrading. As new features spring up such as SPE units new quirks are inevitable and the OS market for AmigaOne models becomes less sustainable.
I don't have time or the budget to maintain both NG Amiga models and classic models and as a hobby coder, most of the programming languages I use work exclusively on the classic models.
If it were just about the money I would have stuck with a MorphOS Mac. If it were just about the nostalgia, I would have stuck with the Blizzard 1230. The Vampire gives the best bang for the buck overall so I'll hold out for it.
