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A reseller event with an Autodesk employee attending and answering questions does not necessarily reflect reality, the beliefs of the product manager or the team developing and evaluating the current and future scope of Revit features. Over the years, I've heard plenty of things that were in direct conflict with things I've been told first hand by people with direct responsibility for various parts of Revit. I've also heard things said in jest but taken as completely serious replies by people who were too intense to notice the humor.
Regardless, I can walk in any building someone else designed and critique the hell out of it. Faced with its designers I'm confident that my every observation could be countered with reasonable explanations for why this or that happened. I believe the same is true of software. I've had dinner with one of the founders a couple of times. Believe me or not, he made fundamental decisions we might disagree with but he made them, he was in charge, had the power to make them and the will to do so.
Revit (any design software) is an incredibly complex assortment of people, code, competing interests both internal and external and time/financial constraints. I invite "you" to get out there and do it better...either by joining them and finding out first hand what its like, joining the competition and finding out the same thing...or try to start your own.
It's not the for the faint of heart. We have Revit to pick on today because some really strong willed and dedicated people decided to do it. Then Autodesk decided to keep pushing really hard too. Personally I'm grateful to them all.
Steve Stafford
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I'm not surprised that an event organized by an Autodesk Reseller and offering speakers from Autodesk has a sales pitch and a bias toward what they consider to be productive conversations about their products. That's the reseller role; sell software, training and support. Autodesk wants to talk about what's new and what they hope to do in the future.
If I were in that position, receiving that sort of comment/question, my response would be, "I understand your criticism. We've heard it before. Obviously this specific issue has not overtaken all of our other priorities yet. Hopefully that will change. Keeping the pressure on us about it helps too. We face a lot of competing interests. Thanks for the comment/question."
I think it's a mistake to believe that the developers are somehow deeply opposed to our ideas. Even utterly obvious and simple (to our thinking) ideas/requests might take considerable energy to evaluate for actual implementation. I've heard a number of tales of the developers encountering "lurking evil" (legacy code and fundamental decisions) en route to granting a wish.
Back in Revit 1.0 I remember one of their staff telling me they had a wish list of over 10k items. That was in 2000, when there were probably less than 250 actual users. There are considerably more of "us" wishing for things than "them" granting wishes. It would help a tiny bit if each of our disciplines could actually agree on what "we do it the standard way" really means too. 😉
Steve Stafford
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