Interesting thread. Here's a meta-comment from a 14-year user of TT, also a retired software engineer. TT/Intuit used to be just awesome when I started interacting with them. They were responsive, responsible, and caring. Even did a lot of end-user testing, including "walk homes" (or whatever they called them) with people buying the CDs.
Now it appears the "bean counters" and marketeers have taken over, milking the product line as a "cash cow". This is sad, but predictable in hindsight, I've seen it in other companies too. Much of it arises from outsourcing more and more components to third parties, and then not keeping close tabs on the results.
In particular, instead of offering friendly ways to interact with company experts and get solutions, it seems they are incapable of even admitting there is a problem (hey, software bugs happen, that's life) and openly working toward timely fixes.
A few years ago I ran into a stupid problem with Form 8962 handling, where TT rounded before adding, when clearly they were supposed to add before rounding. This literally caused us to get audited one year, because the bottom line numbers for the whole year were off by a few dollars, technically the IRS wasn't even supposed to care about that, but their robot did. I figured out how to override and work around the problem, and ~3 years later the software was finally, silently, fixed. Just in time for us to leave the ACA and enter Medicare.
I tried several times to alert Intuit to this problem, and all I got back was, "we are following IRS guidance" (demonstrably wrong).
