Software frustrations

After years of dealing with software companies you would expect that I would have grown callus to the way of things. The general lack of planning and design that many put into their products still astounds me. The lackadaisical approach to maintenance and product enhancements confounds me. Why do we purchase and implement products with such obvious over site? Why do we continue to pay for support and licensing year after year on products that don't mean basic quality standards?
I understand that every piece of software has bugs. I've done enough development to know that regardless of the skill, knowledge and testing performed on a release there is going to be something that is overlooked. Please don't misunderstand, I'm not complaining about bugs, but rather the volume, magnitude and approach taken to correcting them.

Let me give you an example... We currently run a software solution from a very well known software company who is partnered with SunGard Banner. Their product is designed to fill the niche market of higher education housing (dorms, etc). You might think, "that seems pretty simple" and "how can someone mess that up".... well, it's not and they do.

SunGard released version 8 Q3ish 2009. They were very upfront with the fact that their road map included a change to the character set that they required. Their move to UTF8 is something that a lot of companies are doing right now as they standardize their product road map. Now, the partner company's software is designed to work specifically with SunGard Banner and the vast majority of their implementations (if not all) are with this ERP. Even with all this notice and it being over a year since the newest version was released the unnamed company still has not corrected its software to function in a UTF8 environment! Rather than correcting their code, they suggest that any new upgrades or fresh installations are migrated to a MSSQL server. Great call. After all, why would we want to use our load balanced active/active cluster (RAC) that we've paid millions of dollars for? I hope we wise up and say our farewell soon.