Actually this is a pretty new practice in hardware, and even in software (mostly games, it’s a lot easier to get away with it with a game than with a tool) releasing with bugs and let the early adopters essentially do the last round of beta testing really didn’t become standard until the last 10-15 years or so. There may have been one or two minor bugfix updates (often requiring physically swapping out an EPROM) in the life of a product 20 years ago but nothing like what we see today.
It’s a mixed bag though, on one hand companies are definitely cutting corners by essentially outsourcing beta testing to their customers, but on the other hand ti’s pretty easy to update firmware today and by doing it they get a much larger pool of beta testers that at least theoretically should be able to find more bugs faster, simply by brute force. I think it comes down to the size of the company for me. Elektron is still small enough that I think there’s some practical necessity to do it this way, but it wasn’t that long ago that a release as buggy as this (or the Digitakt or the OT MKI…) could have easily (and sometimes did) ruined a company this size and would have been a pretty serious problem for a much bigger company. In the case of Elektron, it’s unfortunate but forgivable because they’re a medium sized company who put out a lot of good, innovative instruments and have an earned reputation for good, long term support. When Akai or Pioneer does something like this it’s a lot less forgivable, and they should be called out on it by customers whenever possiblet. Smaller companies, not so much (as long as they stand by their products and get them working and have some transparency about it). Having customers is a privilege, not a right.
In Elektron’s case I’m not that worried because this seems to happen on half of their releases and they always make it more or less right in a more or less timely fashion. There are still a few minor things in the OT MKI that could be fixed up but overall, the fact that the firmware hasn’t been updated in two years is a GOOD thing, because it shouldn’t need to be.
What I’m saying is, no, releasing fully tested and working products is the baseline and releasing products with buggy firmware that (hopefully - I’m looking at you, Beatstep Pro) gets fixed quickly is a recent trend and it’s natural that people would expect the thing they just bought to work, because until recently that was a safe assumption to make.
EDIT: just to clarify, this is mostly directed at companies like Akai that have the resources to not need to follow this business model and just do it to cut costs (and in the case of the Akai/Alesis/Numark/Ion/Etc conglomerate, don’t really need to cut costs because the vast majority of their profits - at least according to people I’ve known who worked there - actually come from manufacturing electric blankets - one QA guy I knew there a few years back said that for a couple weeks they were actually making QA wear the new generation of electric blankets around while they did their normal work on the MPC Renaissance beta testing, so that they could test both at once and the company wouldn’t have to hire any new people), I think Elektron has a good track record as far as dealing with this stuff goes and unfortunately, even though it’s a shitty business model it’s also the standard now and for better or worse once you reach the scale that Elektron works on it’s probably hard to be competitive (we’ll ignore the question of whether being competitive is actually a good thing) without doing it.
