Bruno, I know you said you didn't always like when companies listened to users, but I can't help but applaud Boxee.

Today I received a personal response from Avner Ronen (Boxee founder), addressing the very long email I sent him point by point! He listened to every single part of my email and CC'd two other people, calling to them at several points to work with me on bugs I'd found (like the flickering line and freezing in the photo mode). That's pretty freaking awesome. I'll attempt to list some of the things he said, most of which were very encouraging and might have made up my mind to keep the Box:

• On the difficulty in navigating to local media: "We hear many complaints about it. going to address it. basically enable someone that uses Boxee predominantly for local file playback to make Boxee respect that and when you click Movies, take you to your local movies, etc."
• On the changes to the interface in general from beta: "1.0 is a big change from the Beta, and I believe we'll make more drastic changes down the road. We need to be better in communicating it to users, but we still think there is lots to do in order to make Boxee compete for input 1 on TVs for most users." I'm glad he knows they didn't communicate the transition well.
• "we are going to bring back the sort orders and reverse sort-orders. just not as part of a left menubar, but rather as a button on top."
• On the movie poster thumbnails: "yes it does not cache the thumbs between reboots. we're going to fix it."
• In response to my suggestion that the home screen be made up of favorited items from around the Box: "that's a good idea. we toyed with it in the past without much success. but i hear you."
• Lastly, he even addressed a really silly bug. See, I have a backup of "Batteries Not Included" in my movie folder. The actual title of the movie, though, is "*Batteries Not included," but because Windows won't let me put an asterix in the file name, when Boxee goes out to find that title, it instead finds the alternative title to "Child's Play," which is of course a very different movie

Anyway, I understand your thoughts, Bruno, and agree that the software on the Boxee Box was just not ready. But this email gave me a decent amount of confidence that they might be on the right track.

It's at least something.