@Gurth YES. I work with it all day long and find it extremely lacking. With the proper team of embroidery industry experience and a kick butt coder, what is currently available could become irrelevant.
What I'm wanting to do is go the Adobe route - make it a cloud based software that would become recurring income. I want to take some cues from Silhouette software (craft cutters) and improve on what currently DOES work about embroidery software. It's just incredibly not user friendly. I actually teach a 5 hour course on how to BEGIN to use embroidery software. The majority of my customers are either younger mothers or retirees. Neither have very long attention spans.
If we could improve embroidery software, there's lots of money to be made.
And sorry for looking like spam, everyone. I figured the chances of me remembering to check in on this post were slim to none. :) But look - bookmark did wonders!!!
I'd love to visit with anyone who might want to attempt this with me. I do almost $500k in a year in digital downloads of embroidery designs, so if we can bring to market a product that would allow people to become their OWN designers, I think we could do really well.