Hello,
I agree with you that the feedback here is not too positive, but you have to take two things into consideration:
a) The feedback in a support forum tends to not positive, because why should you have to sign up on a support forum, when you don’t have problems?
b) The product is new, which means it is also very likely that bugs will come up in scenarios, which could’t have been tested by the vendor beforehand.
I can only tell you from my person experience not related to supporting a software product, which comes from managing larger networks and working with all kinds of software from different vendors. You will always face the situation that a software company will release a new product to the market and having the marketing departments find the best words for it. In most cases it takes one or two service packs till the majority of the customers will have all their bugs fixed and wished fulfilled. That’s my personal experience for completely new products, tough it is often the same for major version upgrades of alreay well-established software.
As a system administrator I always tried to gather different kinds of information beforehand, e.g. other customers satisfaction, time on the market, professional reviews and last but not least my own experience within the test period. The last point always came after some intensive investigation (the points I listed before), so I was sure that I could even install a trial version in a production environment or on a production server. You are right…you can’t deploy every PC with it and roll back in the end, when you come to the conclusion, that this isn’t your product. However you can at least fill 2-3 of the most common clients with it (maybe on Win7, one WinXP,…) and check if it works, maybe even ask for user feedback. Within 30 days you can gather a lot of own experience with it and then make a decision if you will buy that product or test another one.
Speaking from my experience as a supporter right for the avast! products…I admit that the initial release had a bad bug with the SQL installation, however we also had customers which ran a successful installation and saw their needs fulfilled.
Coming back to the original topic…I still see a lot of concept things in the “bugs” you mentioned above, therefore I would tend to say that those things could have been checked before. They are not “real” bugs.