Hi Maurice yes sorry, my previous mail the 'you' was much more directed at Autodesk the entity than you personally, I hope you understand. and yes it was mashed, but I hope to elaborate.
Now that 'you' (Autodesk) are making it is very clear that those great engineers that were moved onto other projects were one part of the reason for purchase, the other was Softimage the product. but at the time , whilst assuring us the existing customers of Softimage the product was going to be ok eg 'the future is bright' etc I do feel that the Softimage user base at that time were never informed properly of the true extent of the engineer stripping until long afterwards . this is perhaps one of those lingering disagreeable tastes as is feels like your obligation was fulfilled with minimum effort whereas back then there was not a sense of EOL as we were assured the product was going to be ok. as long as it was sold as a plugin. or a suite. or not all... so to clarify. with some actual history because yes I am not entirely sure of the facts here and others may be more clued :) but at what point were the Softimage customers informed that the entire engineering team had been moved to a new application? was this only, as you say in Autodesk's statement of intent? as this, in my opinion, was never truly communicated and somewhat hidden to the user base until much later on.