>>We don't know what led up to the decision that was ultimately made.

We do know that immediately after the VFP beta, the decision was already made. Sigler stated it openly. Not easy to blame poor customer response when the decision to damn with faint praise was already made when the product came out.

Seems to me there are big differences between IT and other professions:

1) Other professions appoint their own experts. Experts annointed/incentivized by vendors are called salespeople.
2) Vendors may promote change, but experts, practitioners and entities like the FDA require proof before exciting change can be foist on the public or practitioners. Blogs and anecdote are not enough and if you can't show benefit, your change may not be allowed. Even if it is allowed, if practitioners want to continue a status quo that also has good evidence, trying to force change is suicide.

Interestingly, the LAMP stack has moved back towards appointing its own experts and since the open source principle builds in community/expert support from the start, it's not easy for vendors to force anything. Oracle tried with OpenOffice and it backfired. In time Google will try it on too. Apple may insist on controlling everything, but so far they don't try to force people to fix things that aren't broken.