Comment by lbriner

Saying that is is a multiyear long undertaking was probably a little silly and makes it sound like the person who said that can't have been involved wi4th the software otherwise they would have known this but there might also be another explanation that we have seen, particularly with Microsoft:

You can't sell the things that make people just like the software, only new headline features do that.

Example 1: When you open visual studio 2019, you get a search box by default that allows you to type in your project name and it looks for it in the MRU list. Except this is intolerably slow! I suspect it might not be the searching itself, perhaps a tonne of threads are doing something but it is terrible. ANY search algorithm looking through a list of no more than 50 things should be instance, theirs takes up to around 10 seconds and does fuzzy search by default! Why don't they fix it? They wouldn't sell any more units by fixing it and you won't upgrade to the newer improved version.

Example 2: When you install nuget packages in visual studio on netfx projects, it modifies the assembly redirects in web.config by re-writing the entire file even if there are no changes. Oh, and it adds extra spaces and stuff so that the diff tools think every single line has changed. I have to manually delete all of the entries, build it again, let visual studio warn me about missing redirects, double-click the warning and VS writes the file in the original style revealing the maybe 2 actual changes. This is total horsesh*t but they won't fix it. Why? You should be using dotnet core, even if your project is 5 years old and established.

It's a shame because there are lots of things to like about MS tooling compared to lots of competitors but each of these things will be a coffin nail that eventually will cause people to jump ship.