You might want to be careful. You're at risk of starting to sound like you've an inflated ego and think you're better than us, offering your words of wisdom to help us see the errors of our ways with statements like these. I'm sure you mean nothing of the sort, but each time you say something like this and each time you step a bit closer towards that sort of thing...
It's not that simple though. Just because someone feels like they don't need or want any extra features doesn't actually mean they don't. Right this minute they might need just the minimum, but what about later? And just because they don't think they want the extras, that doesn't mean it wouldn't be of enormous benefit to them and something they'd be glad of later on... The thing is, people accepting just the minimum also makes the lesser option appear more and more valid as more and more buy into it promoting it and causing more and more to select that option while they would have been happier with the other if they had known better. Unfortunately, I'm not just talking about Gateway versus Sky3DS here. I'm talking about pretty much every product ever. This is just the sort of thing I see in pretty much every market all the time. People go with the big name TV that costs more and has less options, people buy the Toyota simply because it's a Toyota (man my old Saturn would have blown away the comparable Toyotas -- I so miss that car -- both in features and capability as well as just all around quality and comfort.) With headphones and speakers, people go with BOSE and get a worse quality product (at multiple levels -- even the casing is cheap.) With smartphones/tablets, people get Apple when for each thing there is a much better alternative (for instance, my Nexus 7 can pretty much blow away the iPad Mini in every single aspect possible.)
Unfortunately, this sort of thing -- in each of these markets -- is ultimately bad for us all. The Apple example is the easiest as it's the most rampant lately, but it applies to each of those (for instance, how many average joes have even heard of Sennheiser? They're the biggest, most obvious brand to at least start from in the headphone world when looking for something better -- they even go so far as to make the lower end products, many of which can even end up in retail stores. Nevermind brands like AKG or a host of others that I doubt any average joe has ever even heard of, but which make products of a quality level that would make BOSE weep in a truly fair market if their business wasn't built entirely out of tricking people. On TVs, my Magnavox had a higher resolution than the SONYs of the time (it's getting on in years now, but still running strong all the same. I can't compare it to the latest TVs presumably though, but it has aged better than many of its competitors by far.) The image resize seems to be of a slightly better quality (perhaps a particularly great example of those things people don't realize they need/want. Most don't realize a quality image resize matters, but then they hook up their console and a game goes down to 720p or even worse and suddenly that resize quality matters doesn't it? Especially since it's low latency, fast processing. In games I notice no delay between the sound/video and my button presses. Another thing they don't even advertise that one must research which matters and people don't ever think about but which is actually quite incredibly important... Most TVs of the time added a quite considerable delay for processing and few of the time seemed to have a "game mode" with the processing disabled.) The more people buy the expensive big name though, the more the expensive big name becomes well known among households, the more they tell others to buy the same brand (people have a tendency towards giving a thing all praises if it does the minimums they require -- nothing more needed -- and doesn't break right off. Companies know this and utilize it, using various methods to encourage this like putting more of the money from the costs of their products towards making the product seem better than it is) and the more said big brand will continue to offer no more than strictly required. In that example, the SONY product had fewer features (less resolution, more latency, etc etc) but it looked prettier on the outside (VERY shiny and flashy exterior) but it cost more and more people were buying it because they didn't know any better (and with a little help from all the various marketing tricks I mentioned.)
Thus it goes from being 100% subjective as you believe to being much less so than most people even realize. The problem with what I've mentioned above and why it affects us all ultimately is that more and more of the worse product will flood the market as people buy it more, tell their friends how great they have been lead to believe that it is and soon the competition starts to become less and less a quality oriented competition and more and more one that is focusing more on just competing on the same ground as their competitor. (Actually, I should have brought up smartphones here because we have the most obvious example ever there: Samsung. Things like TVs have changed in a slow and subtle manner, but Samsung is being blatant to the point of getting lawsuits over it. Samsung used to offer the products that had all around more capabilities and quality as well as support. But now they've decided to compete more directly head-to-head with Apple in every aspect, including those things that actually ultimately reduce quality. The result? A bloatware filled mess with locked down bootloaders that took forever to try to crack and so on.)
Eh, generally speaking if someone says this, they primarily mean just google it a bit, look at the actual features and what people are saying about each, and comparing them with an open mind. We're not talking about stuff to a level of, say, learning precisely what chipset each uses, what frequency it runs at, reverse engineering the software, and etc. Just a quick google and clicking on a few links and reading simply put. Basically just learn the basic gist of the products at hand and their features, nothing more. That is the beauty of the Internet for those willing to take advantage of its actual information capabilities though. These days you can do this level of research within a few minutes at the most once you get the hang of it. Of course, I guess this means they have to not be distracted by pictures of cats or whatever.
By the same token, you can't argue that they aren't stability checking. However, what I most want to be clear on is what I'm saying is they're developing. Product development tends to go into something of a cycle -- one which can easily go too far in fact -- of developing something, testing it, going back and fixing this and that while adding something else, testing again, and so on over and over. If one isn't careful it's easy to go too far in fact, getting stuck in a loop until everything is absolutely "perfect" as far as you can tell so far (well, there's always something more to be fixed somewhere or added, but if you can't find it then it goes into the next cycle.) The thing is, this is pretty much the norm in software development and such. Normally a publisher or boss or whatever is dictating when something will be released, giving them a hard schedule to meet, but Gateway probably doesn't have any such dictation, so they're pretty much going all the way (case in point, I've already stated that I don't think they should have continued focusing on backward support. They should have started right off with just the 9.0-9.2 support, telling people to go ahead and update to 9.2 before 9.3 came out and focused on getting it to work perfectly in that range, released the update, and then gone back and added in support for 8.x, 7.x, and so on. At the very minimum, they should have been satisfied to get it working on 8.1 or whatever it was that Smash Brothers could update to.) So yeah, it's not all stability testing. There's probably a lot of just stuff like them trying to make minor features people may not even be worried about right this moment perfect.
But there's something I think you're not quite getting here. We're not all saying "hey, don't you want a stable release" as if that's just the all of it. What we're saying is that if such a group were being rushed by a boss/publisher/etc to have a hard release date, the results could potentially be very bad. As an easy example, just look at the game market where publishers have been slowly but surely taking more and more control over the dev process (to the point now that they outright dictate direction of games even, not just when they come out.) Almost every single game today is released chock full of bugs because they rush them out (I think everyone's favorite example right now is Assassin's Creed Unity which has even brought about a class action lawsuit.) The thinking is: they can just fix the bugs later, no big deal (the reality is that the end result is a game that's rushed with many things not nearly as developed as they should be, not all bugs even ever get fixed, and the devs eventually drop the game and stop bothering to support it with any bug fixes after a while.) What I'm trying to point out here is that if Gateway were to rush too much, the end result would be something that could potentially cause serious damage. In the software world, you basically are accepting that risk when you buy a game right off, but then most games can't actually break a system (with some exceptions! I've heard of some recent consoles actually being bricked by really bad game bugs.) In this case, it could. So while I do argue that they could have sped things up if they hadn't spent some time focusing on bonus stuff like previous firmware support (but then, it's likely that it doesn't really take much time to add previous firmwares as it's likely just a minor adaptation of the exact same thing and some quick testing to ensure that on said firmware an obvious bug doesn't crop up) I also argue that we don't want them to feel so rushed that they get something out which might well cause serious harm.
Now, all that said, I do think they've been focusing on the wrong model. They seem to have a policy of basically doing all or nothing. So they seem to be focusing on releasing this update with more or less absolutely everything all at once. If they had focused solely on just getting the minimums out there and then added as they went they could have released an update for us with just the basic stuff like ROMs and then given us updates every couple of weeks or so adding another feature or two. On the other hand, it is true that this is the very model that in so many other things results in code that's an absolute mess. Doing it the way they are doing it will probably result in a higher quality of code overall at the expense of making a lot of people unhappy in the meantime and most won't know the difference (but then better code means ultimately it's easier and quicker to actually add more features, things run better, and it's less likely major bugs will crop up later on.)
Damn....talk about a wall.
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