Hey Sean, I hear you and understand what you mean completely. Like you, I've been in this game a while, and I've finally truly learned -- after much self-inflicted pain BTW -- that you get to choose your battles, and sometimes those battles are simply not worth it. And while I agree someone has to hold these companies accountable in this example, there's also a trade-off for accomplishing what you *really* want and need to do vs. getting lost in too much frustration.
Bottom line, you've got some precious time on your hands, you need to get to working on your special projects. Various things are holding you back (i.e. Cubase). So your experience should inform you which battles are going to be worth your time, of course. Then march forward.
In this case, there is some good news:
1) Steinberg theoretically knows about the issues since they've already been improving Nuendo with a better version of DOP. Yes, it's embarrassing that their support doesn't know what is going on. And yes, it's pretty insane that they haven't ALREADY given us the Nuendo version of DOP.
2) Fortunately you have options!
3) You can rail briefly here to keep this thread and issue elevated in Steinberg's peripheral vision. We can only hope they are listening.
4) You can then cut your losses of frustration and time and just NOT use the feature, roll back to v9, etc, etc.
5) You can try the plethora of other DAWs out there that might do the trick
6) While every DAW has issues, and the grass is not always greener on the other side of the hill, one of the other DAWs might just have the magic combination of working features that does the trick for you
7) We are living in an amazing time when even DAWs with bugs as annoying as DOP are STILL pretty amazing to work with. So you might need to suck it up and just work with Cubase as-is, warts and all.
8) PLUS there's no need to be a single-DAW kind of guy -- my recommendation, use at least TWO DAWs these days.
Whatever you do, may I suggest not to blow too much steam and get back to work on your awesome creative project, which is what I need to do as well tonight. Check back in when 9.5.30 drops and see if they did anything. We can raise a little more noise if it still sucks, then move on again. Which is basically what I've been doing (although tonight I'm apparently spending more time than I should on this -- partial self-therapy I guess). Our time is more valuable than Steinberg's issues. It's not even worth it to fight for a refund IMO. If they don't fix DOP, then don't buy Cubase 10. I've been quite happy phasing out Cubase bit by bit and using one of the other great DAWs too. It's up to Steinberg if I ever upgrade again.
And above all, good luck with your project. You CAN do it without DOP.
