Broken Update Path

I understand the desire to gift existing C1 customers some goodies via (free) updates but I would kindly ask for any potentially contentious changes to be reserved for (paid) upgrades.

What is a potentially contentious change?
Answering this question is best approached by covering a number of cases which are never contentious:

- Lifting any existing limitations (such as increasing the number of heal/clone source points in a layer from one to "unlimited") is not a contentious change.

- Purely adding functionality without changing existing functionality is also unequivocally welcome.

- Nobody will complain about increased performance and fixed bugs either.

In other words, anything that can be ignored by those not appreciating it, is a non-contentious change and I'll be the last to oppose to any of that in an update.

However, UI and workflow changes that affect existing workflows should not be part of updates.

Why?

If one does not appreciate these changes and has no way of ignoring them then one shouldn't make use of an available update. While this will allow one to continue as normal, this means that any updates further down the line are not available anymore.

Say an important bug fix is made available in a later update then anyone not embracing a contentious design change that was introduced before cannot get the bug fix without also messing up their workflow. Therefore, I feel that updates should never continue any potentially contentious changes.

As an example, consider the changed brush/layer selection design:
The new proliferation of brush types implies serious downsides:
https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360011296718-Universal-Brush

I understand that, furthermore, functionality has been taken away from heal/clone layers:
https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360011390778-Restore-the-full-prior-function-of-the-heal-clone-layers-please-
(I never used this functionality myself but I am assuming the user reports accurately.)

The user who wrote the latter request went back to an earlier version of C1 20 and is now essentially cut off from bug fixes.

I'm still debating with myself whether I'm going to stay with my current C1 20 version or will accept the update with the new (worse) brush design. Through the use of a new editing console I may be able to mitigate the adverse effects of the new design to some extent and forgoing the multiple source-point improvement is something I'll probably won't be able to pull off, but I really wish that what can only be considered to be a failed experiment in user interface design -- the new brush layer system -- would have been deferred to the next upgrade.

In short, there are two approaches that make sense:
1. Layers of different types and one type of brush that works on all of them (old design).
2. Brushes of different types that work on all layers.

The new design is neither of the above. It features
* layers of different types, and
* brushes of different types, AND
* requires the user to manually match them against each other.

If the user doesn't perform the chore of matching brushes to layers then the software will overwrite the user's layer selection. The new design results in less efficient workflows and discourages the proper naming of layers.

N.B., it would have been easy to deliver the perks of the new design to those who apparently asked for it but also not interfere with the workflows of those who are now hindered by the new design. I keep my fingers crossed that this win-win solution can be provided in a future update/upgrade.