First priority should be quality.
Over 8 years later and the Prime gear’s Engine OS still makes lossless audio files sound as bad as lossy audio files on other gear, and sometimes even worse. If you play a full bandwidth 44.1 FLAC file on Prime gear, the high frequencies will produce aliasing distortion that can muddy up the rest of the audio lower in the frequencies, especially if there’s a lot going on to begin with. Layer two or more tracks together, and it’s even worse. With a very well-encoded bandwidth-limited 128kbps MP3, you can sometimes get better sound on Prime than using the original full-bandwidth lossless version of that file. The moving of the anti-aliasing filter slightly up in frequency to slightly placate complaints of treble roll-off in some ways actually made the sound worse.
As an aside related to hardware quality and not firmware…
They also need to quit with the fast strobing LEDs on future hardware. If you lower the shutter exposure length of your web cam, you will see this on all the Prime gear. I believe this engineering choice is a mistake that’s contributing to eyestrain and headaches in users, and overall user fatigue in combination with the ear fatigue contributed by the aliasing intermodulation distortion. There’s a big push in this area on computer monitors’ LED backlights, and I don’t think it’s something that ought to be ignored on music electronics like this, especially in dark environments.
They should stop cheaping out on faders, replace-ability of upfaders, and simple things like motor grease. Repair-ability should be key, but there’s no excuse for some of this stuff to be skimped on like this. Grease turning into the consistency of chalk? Upfaders that need to be replaced so soon? Not being able to replace them easily is annoying, but the materials quality in spots is pretty poor in the first place.
Back to the firmware…
Second priority can then be stability and overt bugs, but to be honest they do try quite a lot on those. You’re right, though, that with each new feature more bugs are being introduced. Therefore putting stability and solving bugs over feature development would be useful.
Third: new features.