as for beta testing, it almost does not really exist with Autocad and its verticals.
We see things so late, and so little change is made, that its more like last minute bug shaking.
The problem is not the beat testing though, its the lack of involvement of industry people very early on in feature specification writing.
Calssic case is the "new" modeless layer dialog, where layers react immediately.
Sounds good until you work on decent size drawings, where you need to make a bunch of changes, then hit apply.
So modeless was good, removing the apply button was bad.
Modeless xref dialog design stinks too. The idea was good, but implementation was bad for several reasons.
I set layer and xref dialog commands to classic, and will write my own dialogs before using the flawed ones from Adesk.
The funny thing is, Autodesk sees that attitude as normal. They commonly tell me the API is there for any issues, and they only take things so far. They rarely disagree with my design comments, but simply do not implement.
What that does is encourage us to make our own tools, which then become very portable to things like Bricscad.
When a real BIM civil set of tools comes out, I bet it will be no problem to use vanilla acad or brisccad with them, as the interfaces needed are available now in either.
