This whole story rings so true. As a hobbyist developer (mostly, though I do some toll building in Xojo for my paying job, so in that sense, I’m also a citizen developer), I enjoyed being able to work on a hobby project and using my over 20 years of code and experience with Xojo to make it so I could just get things done. It was fun and satisfying to build what I wanted. The Xojo bugs were annoying, but always something that could be worked around (again, that big collection of code). Slightly more annoying was reporting bugs and having them closed as not reproducible or never actually fixed, but, whatever. Is what it is and I could still have fun being productive in my precious spare time.
But, API 2 changed all that. Start a new project, and much of the old code is broken. Worse, a lot of the 20 years of experience is now broken, as well. To add insult to injury we have the new documentation which is constantly annoying. I know it’s just a matter of going through some conversions and then learning the new framework, but I’m a hobbyist. That is neither fun nor rewarding, and really, I don’t have the time for it. If I’ve got to make that much investment, maybe it’s worth a little more effort to just learn something else, with a lot less frustration redoing old stuff and worry that there’s some other big change around the corner. The sad fact is, I get more satisfaction spending my hobby time investigating the alternatives, tinkering with them, and considering what’s possible than being constantly reminded of the API2 verbosity and annoyances with the documentation every single time I look something up – not fun!
I still can’t discern from the various discussions if Xojo think they are targeting pros or citizen developers and/or hobbyists. If this change made things somehow better for Pros, great – hobbyists are just collateral damage. Or maybe the thought was it would make Xojo so much better that it will become attractive to a whole new wave of pros and hobbyists, so a few losses can be tolerated in the near term. But, if the business model is hobbyists and citizen developers, I can’t for the life of me figure the value proposition in API2, and I don’t imagine there are waves of new developers looking at Xojo for pro or hobby use. I work with a lot of young developers, and I don’t know a single one who has ever heard of Xojo. The tools they use are completely different; I just don’t see any way any of them would pick up Xojo on the side, let alone for the paying job. I’m clearly missing some key business insight here, but time to get back to tinkering with other tools.