Eager for 2021 - with good stuff

I don't know why Corel practice this policy. Corel Draw users reports bugs at the beginning when the last version of CorelDraw is released and Corel all year not fix the reported bugs.

Really, really, "interesting".

The lack of bug fix updates is what makes me suspect the CorelDRAW development team is short on manpower and resources. It's also very possible various software developers have come and gone, perhaps with more talented ones leaving for better paying jobs and/or work environments elsewhere.

Take the lone significant point-release update for CorelDRAW 2020 and a "hot fix" update for CDR 2020 (two product updates total for the life cycle of CDR 2020) and compare that to what Adobe has done with Illustrator over the same year-long time span. The difference in the number of updates and the quality of updates is pretty staggering in Adobe's favor. AI 24 had 3 big point-release updates featuring major improvements as well as perhaps a dozen minor stability updates. AI 25 just had its first point-release update since its late October debut, but also had a couple stability updates prior to that. Adobe Illustrator isn't 100% perfect. The 25.1 update broke a number of plugins, particularly on the Mac side. But at least Adobe and plugin developers have been moving quick to address them rather than just let the bugs sit as is for months on end.

That could be true. It takes time and resources to produce such content, not to mention do other things like publish printed user manuals and clip art libraries. I can still remember the days of a CorelDRAW retail upgrade featuring a huge box full of stuff. Not anymore.

Adobe does produce a good amount of its own "how to" content on video. Overall it seems like a much greater percentage of tutorial videos for graphics applications are created by third parties not employed by the software developer. Some are pretty good and others are kind of junky. I don't know how many tutorial videos exist on YouTube for CorelDRAW vs the number for Illustrator, but I'm pretty sure Illustrator has a much greater number of how to videos overall.

Corel were naive when they went to yearly releases. They didn't understand that it took them 2 years to iron out the bugs that they added with a new version. Very few people back in the day would upgrade until SP1 came out because we knew that there was a lot needed fixing. Now you don't get a proper service pack, just a minor bug fix, if you're lucky. Old bugs remain and new ones get added.

And of course marketing had to have something new to sell the product, so the new functionality became much more lightweight and easy to implement and the constant pressure meant that new functionality never really got bedded in and 'fixed' because they had to start work on the next version. Best in class was a stranger to Corel thinking, 'It'll do' was closer to the mark.

Beta testing starts around October time for a March release, so if you dismiss April because the devs' will be flat out sorting login, upgrade, serial number, etc etc issues, so in effect there is about 3-4 months for bug fixing because by end of August they will start work on Alpha versions of the next release.

Corel thought they could extract more money from the yearly release model, but I'd bet they are getting less, a lot less because of the decision to cut off the upgrade option. I personally won't upgrade from 2018 (even though I have 2019) until I can see £599 worth of new value. I doubt I ever will. I am reconciled to having to run Hyper-V anyway to keep X5 running as security for opening old files so I will stick with 2018.

Corel are on the downward slope and I think a number of the more experienced devs left a few years back. Tony Severnuk, Hendrik Wagenaar, Alex Vakulenko et al, I think think they saw the writing on the wall.

CDGS might be Corels flagship but its holed below the waterline, and it can't keep up. They need to spend x10 the annual dev budget just to bring PP up to snuff and about the same to get Draw reliable and restore its reputation. Then it needs some seriously good new functionality. And all the ideas are there, in Corels database, over the years they milked the beta testers. We gave them a heck of a lot of good ideas and were mostly ignored.

I tried to have a conversation, before I left the beta programme (was kicked out actually) with the head honcho about an idea that would have been pretty easy to implement, they already had the tools doing similar things within Draw, and it would have been a killer feature (actually a vector trace tool, to convert line drawings to fillable areas, anyone CCCFER from 20 years or so ago, coined by K N Pepper, RIP). They didn't really want to know, they are very fixed in their ideas about what customers want, even though I doubt anyone at Corel actually uses or has used Draw to earn a living.