I agree, there is no point in implementing AI, Command, etc fixes unless the main performance issues are fixed, unless they want the sim to work for only a few people, and those few people won't produce enough sales of the sequel for the series to survive.

Then they should of made the performance patch a priority at release and not 8 months down the line, again smacks of poor management.

+ Major Performance Problems: i5 Quad@4.1ghz / 8Gb DDR3 / GTX570 2.6Gb, running on SSD raid-0 and I can't even play decently on medium!

I wonder why sequel updates are considered an "insult" by most of the community...

I understand the team is composed by people with different skills, so just put them all to sort out CloD problems first, please!

Model guy? Check every model already made instead of creating new ones.
Sound guy? Confirm if every single sound file is error-free.

And so on!

To be honest, I'm tired of waiting for professionalism..

Yes that should have been their priority, I afraid though that they may pull the bells and we will be left with just the whistles.

My best guess would be something along the lines that once they started tugging at the stray thread of poor performance then the entire ball of game engine fell apart (man, I regret this analogy already). Sometimes in software you start digging and it's hard to know when to stop if all you find is sand.

Some staff changes can cause chaos as well - new people tend to always go for the 'what the heck is this, we need a re-write!' approach.

Maybe Frog but that would make more sense if Luthier was handed the code on release and had no part in the development of the code in the 2 years before release.

Exactly there are any number of reasons. I'm sure they were doing their best to optimize the existing code, but finally came to the conclusion that the only way they were going get the improvements necessary was to rewrite that section. Its easy to say they should have started rewriting a year ago, but thats not how it works. If they had decided too rewrite a year ago the sim would have probably been cancelled. The early release is actually funding this rewrite. And no its very doubtfull there was a conspiracy, its just how to worked out.

I wish it were as easy as some people seem to think it is.

Ive never said there was any conspiracy Chivas, just miss-spent funding and poor management in the 5 years of development, plus terrible development decisions, sloppy leadership and the worst PR and launch in flight sim history....oh wait its that's all wrong, its just unfinished.

The conspiracy comment wasn't directed at you in particular, but I could probably find a number of your posts that suggest it, but I can't be bothered. What you say about their management may have some elements of truth, but its more likely highly exagerated. Its just one of so many reasons why most developers never involve the communities in the development process.