It was in many studios and many situations, but the problem again is missunderstood, the problem was not the removal of mental Ray but the removal of any right of network rendering with the max mainstream render engine. I think as a community is much better to see all the players as an ecosystem, they balance the prices and move innovation forward, moreover, they are used by colleges whos spent countless hours (and a lot of money) developing a pipeline, to not consider them is just isolationist and counterproductive, as a community we are stronger banded together to have empathy is only a good thing and makes it more likely for you to have the community behind you when they come for your software. Good news implies thet there’s a benefit to come from this for the users, If a person was not using it then there’s no benefit, if a person was, there’s certianly no benefit, bad or good it was another player in the field (at $95 for Nvidia carrying workstations). It’s also bad news the way things went for users, they are never considered and this is a trend we’re seeing more and more, the simple fact that this happened again is indeed very bad news. The EOL is not bad news for me personally, but as a member of the CGI community it certainly is, It was indeed bad news when Max stopped having unlimited nodes for a production ready renderer.
Personally I don’t use MR since college, still, less players in the field.
The biggest problem I see with this EOL is what should we do with our legacy work, I this case we are safe, we have our max and Maya 2017 licenses and that’s it, we can recover our work and translate to Blender, and we won’t go further with Autodesk in any sense, but others that have legacy work and are in rental… they won’t be able to recover anything in a few time… and that is not good, and yes, there are time when you have to recover a 5 year old project to update it, and having to translate it to a different engine, or not being able to recover all the materials is a big problem. I think you are focusing too much in the industry you think is the bigger one, and in the quality you like, but the reality is that there are many studios with many different pipelines with different qualities. And also… why should those studios reasonably good VFX? Studios with a visually high quality work should be ignored? They pay the same as any other studio, they have no discount because their job is not the prettiest one.