I'm not the best representative of the entire company, I really only get to see a small window of what's going on. I get to see a list of bugs from customers, and a list of requirements from those above me. I just program and try to keep as best of a pulse on what's going on as I can.
ASGvis, when it existed, was able to resell it's own product, which allowed us to play around with numbers some, but the underlying pricing scheme was always based upon the way Chaos Group did things. When 2.0 came out and RT came out, they charged for an upgrade. Now we are at the point where RT is working in our plugin core (with VfR at least). It's all still in the air though. I haven't heard any talk of definite pricing, licensing, etc. We are still at the point where we are trying to figure out what we need to tackle, when, how, and how long it will take. I wasn't told the final price of the VfR upgrade until the day of release, so I'm really not the best person to talk to about that kind of stuff.
Tom - I understand the frustration, we will do our best to make our next release worthwhile, regardless of the pricing or feature set. We have made tons of fixes and optimizations already, it should be exciting to see what else we can improve.
If it were up to me, I'm not sure if I'd opt to spend the time ripping features out of the current implementation of our product so that we could put out a bugfix patch, or if I'd spend that time to get the current features in VfS. Both options would probably take a similar amount of time, and each have their pros and cons, so it's a tough call.
