Personally, outside of the volume bug, I had no 'unworkable' problems. The issue with the random blackout of the lights when connected to the network, was easily worked around once I found the correlation. Of course, I had to reconnect it everyday to get the volume back up, but from there it was just a matter of disconnecting it every time after setting the volume back to its correct value. On that subject of blacking out while being connected to the network, I would like to know if it was only the few of us (I counted 5) that experienced it, and if all the others were running their show with the conductor unplugged from the network, or plugged but without seeing the issue.
A few things that might be important:
-my conductor was built using parts from mouser and spark fun(?) (i.e. not coming from a coop)
-my router is (and that might be the source of the problem) an integrated router/modem. It is a motorola sbg6580, giving me 110Mbps down and 20Mbps up (I won't be touching this for a while)
I think I know that, like several other people, I will be (way) above 16K channel in 2014. I know that there is a slave solution that would/should allow me to play a show with that many channels, but this is a limitation that will make people look around for other solutions. The sequencing part is a lot more time consuming than the building time of those boards, and if there are solutions that allows for an easy way to test any given sequence, while they are sequencing, they will definitely 'explore' those solutions. Especially if the rest of the network can remain the same.
Software wise, the current control panel is adequate. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles that it could, might be a little confusing for people who are not spending 12 hours a day behind a computer, but once you get the hang of it, it does its job (except for the default sound volume) perfectly well. With spare cycles, of course it could be enhanced but to me, the main priority should be to break the 16K channels barrier. I might be in the minority, I have absolutely no idea, but reading around I know I am not the lone guy out there.