Quote:
More on topic, I thought the deal was kind of killed by a few things that the empeg guys said. They seemed to feel that bringing Rob up to speed would be a prohibitively difficult task.

I think it's probably more accurate to say that there would be a prohibitive lack of motivation to do so. Rio won't spend so much as ten minutes on something that has no clear benefit to them, which isn't entirely unreasonable in the context of corporate politics.

None of the post 2.0 (and even many pre-2.0) releases were worked on with the permission or knowledge of the company. We simply stayed late and got them done. As Hugo has pointed out, the motivation of individuals to do that sort of thing has dwindled away for a variety of reasons (families, social lives, having your creative spirit gradually sucked out of you etc). Almost all 3.0 functionality happened by chance (i.e. it was developed for Karma) and for most of the rest of it we can thank Peter and John G, within whom the empeg flame is not yet fully extinguished.

Rob