Yes, it is a bit controversial indeed, I admit. It was not the very original plan, but there was a lot of push for external developers being able to add buttons to the Analyze ribbon. I do not remember all the details surrounding the decision, but I recall it was partly due to the fact that Revit itself was not feature rich as far as analysis goes; most of the functionality was expected to be external anyway, with a great deal coming from Robot, our then affiliated partner.
As for the supported/unsupported features, frankly, I would not really care that much. I myself hacked my way to AutoCAD (long time ago 🙂 because my then customers wanted me to. So I do understand what developers like you are coming from. However, there are “unsupported” and “Unsupported” ways. This one in particular can create headaches for us, because when external applications find they way to the Ribbon without Revit knowing about it. then when a crash happens (and there are always some), there will be no report of any such activity in the dump file and the journal. We will simply not be able to tell the user what happened. We always advise them to uninstall any external applications that might have, but it is not always as black and white, for some of the crashes (most of them that are caused by pursuing unsupported features) are rather random in nature.
Very sorry for the inconvenience.
Arnošt Löbel
Sr. Principal Engineer
Autodesk, Revit R&D
Arnošt Löbel
