Focus Stacking in CC 2014 No Longer Works (Rant)

Question

I just spent HOURS on 2 different computers trying to do Focus Stacking for 2 jobs I'm working on which I couldn't get to work. I just used it a couple of weeks ago without a problem. (And yes I do use the correct procedure :Files>Scripts>Load Files Into Stacks>Attempt to Auto Align>Select All Layers(in Layers Panel)>Edit>Auto Blend Layers>Stack Images) Of course I thought it was something I was doing wrong, so I spent all this time trying to troubleshoot on my end. Finally I tried the Help Chat and spent another bunch of time reproducing the problem and making screen captures to show the CSR only to find out that it is a known issue at Adobe and it might be fixed in the next update. BTW, it was very obvious that the CSR was helping a list of customers at one time since it took so long in between responses. How aggravating.
Here's the rant I left on one of their questionnaires:
So you ask "How can we improve the Creative Cloud?" My answer is,  INFORM YOUR LOYAL CUSTOMERS WHEN THERE IS AN ISSUE WITH YOUR PRODUCT SO THEY DON'T WASTE THEIR TIME TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT'S WRONG WITH THEIR SYSTEM. JUST LIKE A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO, WITH THE ISSUE OF HAVING TO CONSTANTLY SIGN IN WHENEVER YOU LAUNCH ANY OF THE CREATIVE CLOUD APPS.
Is it really so difficult to do this now that we are joined at the hip with this monthly fee Creative Cloud? I'm sure that you'll let us know immediately if we don't make our monthly payment right?

Answer 1

Noel Carboni wrote:
twenty_one wrote:
Alerting customers to known issues like this is a reasonable request. Especially with a major functionality breakdown like this. It's a different matter with esoteric issues affecting only a few users.
I'm sure that's a particularly troublesome distinction for Adobe in this particular case, for precisely the reason you mentioned.  Though it's a basic failure, I'd wager only a small minority of people use the various image combination features that rely on the functionality that's broken.
As a career software engineer / architect / manager who worked a long time in the corporate world myself, I've faced situations where a release was imminent yet some piece of functionality was found to be broken.  There comes a judgment process to determine whether a majority of folks will get value from the new version while a minority might find it problematic.  The two things I came away with from all that experience were:
Document everything.  Let the customers know.  They need to be informed to make good decisions themselves, and it really helps no one to try to keep things secret.  No one's perfect, and surprisingly, customers are willing to be quite understanding IF you keep them in the loop.  It's not even a bad idea to publish the entire bug list.
I decided that once I were to run my own business (which I do now) I would fix all known problems before release.  If that means a delay, so be it.  That's been especially effective for a number of reasons...  I don't get many problem reports (so I can move forward with new work), I don't have a shaky platform (so I can move forward with new work), etc.  Since I set the release schedule and since my development team is small I can pull it off.
I mention the latter note because now, with Adobe's new cloud delivery processes, shouldn't the pressure to release on a particular date have been reduced?
Is there still a "release date is king, and all else a distant second priority" philosophy at Adobe?  Of course a corporation should always challenge itself to get things done, but why did 15.1 (excuse me, 2014.1) have to be released right when it did rather than wait a few more weeks and fix at least the newly found problems?
I honestly thought the Creative Cloud shift would help fix the shortcoming at Adobe where they release what's on hand no matter whether it all works.
To Adobe's credit, the Creative Cloud application now does allow you to roll back to a working version if the newest one broke something you rely upon.  That's new, and I think an under-documented and under-appreciated feature.
-Noel
Noel, I couldn't agree more with your comments.  I'm mad not because there is a problem but the lengths one needs to go to find out about it once you discover that something isn't working in the release the way one expected it to.  A "bug" sticky for each release at the top of a forum such as this is would BE A GOOD WAY OF HELPING USERS, a basic business ethic that Adobe seems to have forgotten about, the customer IS KING.  I'd agree that the CC was expected by users to sort out the problems of release timings but to their credit if you didn't see a release for 6 months due to increasing software bugs you might question the need to have a CC in the first place versus the old way of releasing updates.  Is this essentially a problem of software becoming tooo complex with fixes in one are just creating problems somewhere else? - I'm not a software engineer just a knowledgeable user.  If I was paying $50 a month for using a couple of CC programmes with disparate uses then I would be seriously thinking why but that question comes at the end of the year for me.
I would also agree that the rollback feature is very useful...
-Tim.