Back in early March, when Adobe released Lightroom 4, they introduced a nasty bug that would kill people's custom tone curve adjustment after the upgrade from LR3. As I use tone curve adjustments all the time, this bug hit me especially hard, which is why I became very vocal about it very quickly.

It is now May, about two months after the initial Lightroom 4 release.

What has changed in those two months? Unfortunately not a lot. Has Adobe delivered an updated version that fixes the issue? Not really. Adobe acknowledged that the bug exists, they released Lightroom 4.1 RC1, a release candidate that apparently fixed the issue, then they released Lightroom 4.1 RC2, the second release candidate added new features (32bit HDR TIFF support, better color fringing controls).

The one thing that everybody expected from Adobe and that has not happened though: Adobe did not release an official 4.1 version yet. They had two months for it. Instead they decided to add new features. Also, over the last two months, photographers who paid for Lightroom 4 and wanted to use it for the new features, had to make do with half-tested pre-release software (yes, pre-release, that's what a "release candidate" is).

Not just that, but the first 4.1 release candidate introduced new bugs, including that publishing to Flickr doesn't work anymore (which, they claim, is fixed in RC2)

Adobe?! What is going on? Did you decide to abandon in-house quality assurance and instead rely entirely on end user beta testing? Is introducing new features more important than providing a stable and working version 4.1? This all leaves an uneasy aftertaste with me.

Adobe, when can your users who already paid for the software two months ago expect a working release?