You're getting quite worked up. If you want to switch switch.
The point actually is I DON'T want to swtich, but I would like to see some end user benefits like enhanced discovery, being able to search fields/data points that are already collected and similar stuff worked on instead of a few big (and most likely not widely used) things being implemented. I laugh at a lot of the folks... they tell you to "shut up and sit at the back of the bus, we don't want to hear your input/suggestions", yet the very thing they are creaming their britches about are from those folks that spoke loudly in support of something that they may have had interest in. There's a phrase for folks like that.
Actually for the pipe site still trying to determine which one to go with and leaning towards IPS as I can make use of Pages on it (as I did originally). As I stated, the Astro site is pretty much locked into what it is because of the dependence on the extensive 3rd party apps that would take time for me to develop equivalent of in Pages or money to have a Pages equivalent coded.
I also have to decide if I want to run down that road of running multiple sites again, because I have 3 domains of interest to me, and none of them are associated with each other.
It's more frustrating than anything. How long has the editor been known to have issues? When did they finally acknowledge it and start "looking for alternatives". AFAIK, there has been editor issues for a couple of years.
Take a look out in their suggestion area... suggestions from a decade or more ago, some of which would not apply now and there has been no action taken on them (either closing them or showing as not planned or already implemented). Simply doing some good housecleaning in that area would make it even more beneficial as you don't have to filter through XF 1.x specific suggestions that are no longer applicable in most cases.
Folks getting into XF need to know it's VERY dependent upon 3rd party add-ons to do much more than basic offerings now. You pay $55 for an ES add-on to enhance your content discovery... but if you really want it to work well, you pay another $60 for a 3rd party add-on for the 1st party add-on to get it to do basics that it should already be doing, but even then it misses a lot of content that can be created and SHOULD be searchable/discoverable.
I run 43 add-ons... of those, only 10 are for features that are not offered by XF. All the rest of them are to extend basic features that that they offer in the core script to provide more usability of those base functions. And I'm an add-on minimallist as much as possible.
there's no 'forever' option for self hosting on IPS and
Incorrect... all you know for SURE is you will get it for 2 years.... you MAY get it for longer, but there is no written guarantee of that. What you DO know is they have already TOLD you that standalone is on it's last breath. And they have strongly indicated version 5.x will be the last of it. Realistically you may get upwards of 4 years... but the decade that certain partaies claimed are a (pardon the pun) pipe fantasy. Why should I spend a lot of time (and money) investing in IPS on a site that most likely will not be able to be self-hosted in 2-5 years (more likely the lower end of the scale) when I KNOW that the standalone script is on it's knees with its head on the chopping block?
It's referred to as making long term plans instead of the "oh, this makes me feel good right now, screw the future" plan making.
And when one is already running an environment to self-host in and have the abilities to do it, it's rather wasteful to pay someone else to do what you are already doing.
I have no issues with them killing their standalone script... I've seen the "quality" of many of those "admins" that ran IPS back when I ran it (they were more like site managers), and they couldn't server administer themselves out of a wet paper bag, so I can see where the support load(s) would be running IPS ragged. Many of them had hard enough times even with shared hosting. So for those type "admins" the SaaS is a VERY viable option. In fact, if I was only running one site, I'd probably strongly contemplate an SaaS offering, as it allows more "me" time.
Of course, the ultimate "simple" solution is you tell those license holders "sorry, that's a server administration issue, not covered by your licensed support", but then that makes the license holders upset. Since I only needed their support 1 or 2 times (that were directly script related issues) I can't speak much to the quality other than I had no complaints with those instances of support.
XenForo support has no issues at all telling their license holders similar. If it's server related, you need to engage outside services if you can't handle it yourself.