I think what has happened is Boonex stopped listening to their own community. Look at what we are seeing here - the best and most supportive members are becoming disgusted and some are even leaving. It seems to me the real energy is no longer in the product itself but rather in the paid mods the development staff is making. Some of these seem to be offering functionality that should have been in the product in the first place.

I also believe they over hyped D7 - way too early, and tried to see more do too much at once. As a result, almost nothing works well. I'm not sure how much time was spent on things like the iPhone apps or Facebook connect, but I haven't found anyone who thinks these things work in the real world. Meanwhile, D7 doesn't even have basic functions like join forms and search fully working after nearly two years.

Mauricecano makes a good point about "drive by postings" of Boonex staff and cherry picking the bugs to fix. Whenever someone posts a technical issue on the Blogs, they are told to go to the forums. The community there does often help, but Boonex almost never does. It's too bad, because the community there has developed many of common sense fixes that should be in the product - but I have a sinking feeling that they are not.

What has been gradually lost here, I think is what I would call "The spirit of open source". More and more this is seeming like a tightly held company, with us as the unpaid testing staff, and our customers as the guinea pigs. I think we somehow need to get back to that mode of "sharing" I saw when I first came here. This should start by really listening to at least two kinds of people here - the other developers who understand code, and the people who are trying to build communities that make this software work in the real world. I still think this product has incredible potential, and certainly wouldn't recommend dumping it like others here, but I do think things are moving in the wrong direction.