I’m heading to NAB today, and I remember sitting in the Autodesk suite years ago to see a tech preview and discuss roadmap. I was sitting next to Jeroen Schulte from ILM. The Dev team put up a slide with two columns of features. The column on the left was essentially what became PBR shading in Action, and the column on the right was essentially what became Connected Conform. We were asked to vote on our preference. Jeroen said to only focus on the Action column on the left because he had no use for conforming tools, and I said to only focus on the right column because I conform every day and have no idea what PBR shading even means. It was an amazing moment of clarity for me: There’s a diverse user base, everyone wants something different, everyone prefers their feature needs and there’s only a finite amount of development resources. As it turns out, in time we got both PBR and Connected Conform, and since going freelance I don’t conform anymore or really use PBR shading in Action 
There’s no right answer to this question, but in my experience, I’ve gotten more day-to-day use out of the quality of life improvements than the big tent pole features. As an example, I rarely have the need for camera tracking, so I almost never use the new camera analysis node. Not a slight against it, but the truth is that I rarely go there. I use grain management every single day, and am super excited to have the new node. I don’t think I have ever used the Image node in the timeline. Grading in the timeline is just something that I never do given the type of work that I have been doing. That being said, I know that there are benefits from the Image node that I do realize every day, especially as I get more and more into color management and dealing with different color spaces and color workflows, and I swear by gmasks and matchbox CC inside of action, which is the same toolset.
Are there features or areas of interest that I’d like to see more dev resources applied to? Absolutely! But I also understand that there are finite resources, and all the talks I’ve had with the Dev Team have taught me that they don’t go into these things lightly. Adding a feature means supporting it for decades, for example, and all that support comes at a cost. All the work that went into Vulcan/Apple Silicon support means added runway for improvements and I saw a 30% speed improvement with a sw install. That 30% means I’ll get more done in less time, and see a longer term value in my HW investment. Sexy? No, but I truly appreciate the value and I’m very exited to see where we go from here!
I know where I’m going from here….THE AIRPORT! 
