What was that about suite once + was released? I missed something happening? 
The other two points are subjective, perhaps the upgrade to 12 was underwhelming to some. And perhaps some find it negative to have to be online 5 seconds once every 365 days 
I really wouldn’t recommend jumping on Reason today. I have a license and so I have sunk cost (money and above all time), otherwise I wouldn’t bother with it.
Trying to look at it from an outside view, it feels like Reason is giving up on the idea of being a premier DAW and is investing more in becoming the one-VST-to-rule-them-all via a subscription.
Sidebar: I’ve been nagging one of the main product managers at Reason, who I had the privilege of collaborating with at one point at a product education/program, that they should partner with a hardware manufacturer to make hardware controllers for Reason. I think I made that suggestion back in 2017 even. I’m sure that hardware is a difficult path to explore for a niche player but I always felt like that was the missing link for Reason. They put so much emphasis on skeumorphic design and they make truly inspiring soft synth instruments, yet they have nothing that approaches the tactile nature of a Push 2, or Maschine, or Akai Fire, or MPC Studio. Reason is the DAW that is the most chained by the mouse and keyboard interface, and there are hardly any good mappings of modern hardware.
With the Push 3, I’ve decided to explore migrating to Ableton Live 11 instead and finally getting that missing hardware link of the DAW.
It will require an OS upgrade on my music computers, and one of my machines can’t run the OS required, so that will have to stay on an older version that hopefully will keep working with the Ignition key.
They dropped the entire suite version, so now there’s just Reason 12 with whatever stock REs they include or Reason+ on subscription that allows you use to all the other REs. If you want the REs that came with suite you have to buy them individually, which is pricey to do. So basically they got rid of a decent deal for people who don’t want to pay on the never-never. They also jacked the upgrade price while adding little value for existing owners.
Same. One of the things about the company that most annoys me is they come up with decent technologies, with a very generous license model, then seem to lose interest in them. ReWire is the most obvious, but there’s also REX2, and Remote which is one of the best ‘auto-mapping’ systems going but has apparently been neglected for years. Then there’s Rack Extensions, again with a generous open model allowing nearly anybody to get access to the API, but totally stuck within a walled garden and with limited return for your efforts. Oh, they also like to drop their own REs sometimes. PX7 for instance, which isn’t available any more and will probably not ever be updated for newer versions of Reason.
Strange company all told. They really lost focus of the core appeal of the software and have been floundering around for years now.
And if you owned Reason 11 Suite and bought it specifically for the additional Rack Extensions you are now no longer able to sell them on - a decision most likely made in order to push their subscription on users, so your license’s resell value got downgraded to Reason 11 status for your loyalty.
Rack extensions have never been able to be sold, they are tied to your account. I bought 11 suite, was a great bundle deal 
I think he means you can’t sell on the suite bundle. You can sell the Reason license, but without the extra REs.
Because it was a bundle to get a bunch of rack extensions, and rack extensions cannot be sold. I wish they were able to be sold or transferred.
This! They need to make a controller that looks, feels and works like a hardware synth/drum machine with capability to also program Matrix and Redrum patterns, chain them in the sequencer and use blocks view. Not generic like Push but more “knob per function” approach with well designed menus just for setting additional device parameters (like Thor modules, NNXT multisamples etc.). Since Reason devices are fairly static looking, the could really make something that feels real.
This way mouse would only be needed to add device in the rack, connect the cables and the mixer and linear sequencer. They could even partner with some mixer developers to implement midi control mode for the mixer.
Add to this some sort kind of performance mode to be able to jam with it hardware style and I would switch back to Reason in a second and probably ditch most of my hardware too.
Ideally you’d be able to add and delete devices from the hardware device, like you can on Push. Reason’s auto-routing is usually pretty smart and does what you’d expect 9/10 times.
Anyway, we can dream of a device with lots of knobs, good info displays, nice responsive feel… But we all know that they’d just end up making some plasticky, hobbled touch-screen rubbish.
I may be wrong but I believe when they still offered the suite version you could sell your license as a complete bundle, including the relevant REs.
They’ve existed for 20+ years now so I think we all know they won’t be making hardware controllers at all, sadly. The product manager mentioned that they are partnering more closely with midi controller manufacturers to get them to ship Reason scripts for new controllers (like Arturia’s new Minilab 3) but that’s not nearly enough to compete with something like an Akai Fire. Minimally Reason should introduce the possibility to assign an endless midi encoder to the “currently selected knob” (a paradigm that doesn’t even exist in their current UI). That way you could assign a knob on your favorite controller and use it similar to how you use the main rotary knob on the MPCs.
The Remote specification is quite comprehensive and has options for endless encoders. You can send text strings to displays and so forth. A comprehensive Akai Fire script would be very do-able (except sadly ReDrum didn’t offer mappings for the step sequencer, if i remember correctly). It all went a bit sideways when they introduced REs which meant there was no longer a fixed set of possible devices to control. But yeah, as far as mapping it yourself via the GUI goes it’s pretty dismal.
Unfortunately Reason doesn’t have such a concept as “currently selected UI element” beyond the currently active rack device. Meaning, you can’t click on eg the Filter cutoff knob on a Europa synth and have that map to anything like CurrentlySelectedKnob using a Remote script.
It’s pretty ironic that that one parameter would mean you could use a hardware encoder for 80% of all your work in Reason.
Same thing with eg engines in Europa. Each engine has its own parameters, like Engine1ShapeKnob, Engine2ShapeKnob etc, rather than CurrentlySelectedShapeKnob. It’s just not designed for that kind of contextual hardware interface that makes the MPC, Push, and Fire so useful.
Louis Rossmann, a quite large YouTuber most famous for his involvement in the right-to-repair movement, made a video about Reason Studios and how they’ve made old versions of Reason unusable.
He’s making a number of great points.
actually that’s not true … i live like that, remotely … no internet … but have solar and use technology. It makes it bit off a robbery, when you buy 400 USD software and can´t use it because of no internet !!! When previously it was possible …
if anybody has a way of making reason 9 (i have purchased while back) run on win10 in offline mode, i would greatly appreciate help on this. I live remotely without internet and its a real pain for them to cut off the online activation for an offline use!
Maybe the old ignition key dongle would work? I don’t know if they cut support for it. I’m not sure you could put a license on it nowadays. It’s bad that they did this, im not upgrading Reason anymore but it is still a great software, im on v11, and also have to use online activation.
They stopped all activation for the old Wibu/Codemeter license methods in September, this includes the Ignition Key (which is just a rebranded Wibu dongle), so versions older than 12.6 can no longer be authorised for permanent offline use.
I forgot all about this. The hard drive on my 2011 Mac Mini tanked on me. It was a slow machine anyway, and I haven’t upgraded Reason past version 10. So when I replace the Mac, I’ll replace my DAW as well.