About support cases, I would not put my hopes on them though. Still there are a lot of quirks that I've wrote about in support cases AND on Phase forum, simple things like keeping the same bloody preferences for file numbering and not needing to enable that damn same processing receipt over and over again, for every session.
These were not fixed from CO5 to CO7, after three(?) years.
I never understood the personal way in which people take their software-improvement requests. Perhaps you can help me understand.
Just track through this forum and the phase one forum and compile a list of ALL the requests from v4 that were made more than once and I think you'll see how much of v5/v6/v7s improvements were derived from user requests.
I sit in an interesting position. I am not Phase One, but I do have their ear and I also have a light background in programming. I am not a customer, but I do have their ear and work with them on a day to day basis. So a few times a year I compile together all the requests that I hear on a frequent basis and take those to the dev team (same as you do by starting a support case). Literally three fourths of my requests have been addressed; sometimes directly (they took the path I* requested) and sometimes indirectly (taking some other path to the underlying problem).
So while I agree with both of those requests (both fit into a category I'd call "Greater control of default settings in a new session") the fact that they have not been implemented does not mean that the dev team isn't reading and using support cases to guide C1 development. There are literally
thousands of different requests and I know it's frustrating when one or two that are important to you aren't implemented but to then suggest that others not use support cases to log their feature requests is very counter productive and borderline mean.
As one prominent example I can tell you for sure that the number of requests for dSLR live-view was the tipping point for implementing it in v7. This feature requires a lot more time to implement, troubleshoot, test, and maintain (update for new cameras) than you'd think. Adobe, with it's much larger team, hasn't taken it on. But the number of users that started support cases requesting it convinced the dev team that it should be undertaken.
And, as a side note to help alleviate some of your annoyance, there is a very easy workaround for both of the problems you suggest. Simply start a "template" session (i.e. a normal session that you don't plan on shooting into, but are only creating to use as a template in the future), and establish all your defaults (file naming, process recipe selection, etc etc) and in the future instead of starting a new session simply go to the finder and duplicate the template session and rename the duplicate. Is it as elegant? Perhaps not (and again I agree with your feature request for great control of session defaults), but it takes literally seconds, and if you have any programming skills you can write a few-line script that does it for you with whatever name you enter into the script prompt. These are the sort of techniques we teach in our
Capture One Training courses.
The fact is Phase One's dev team is quite demonstrably more accessible and responsive than the "big boys" (Apple/Adobe). When you submit a support case with a feature request you are 1-2 people away from the guy who actually types in new code. It's a focused product with a smaller target market than Adobe/Apple pursue with their broader prosumer approaches. They've consistently shown they guide the product development based largely on customer feedback; the fact that two of your requests have not been implemented doesn't change that.
*I'm not making a self-involved claim here. In all likelihood I was NOT the first to suggest a particular path, nor the last, and the path was probably already discussed by the programmers before anyone brought it up since the dev team eats/breaths this stuff. Still, there is a sense of satisfaction/pride that comes when a feature you requested is implemented, especially if it closely matches your specific suggestions. It's not necessarily logical, but it is understandable. So perhaps, by understanding that pride I can understand a bit of the malice that comes when your suggestions aren't (yet) implemented.