No probs, realistically (as a SW guy myself) I appreciate support can’t live on forever - it’s just that looking at feature additions I had no plans to acquite Vero V whilst this one serves all my needs… hence it just feels like I’d be forced to get a Vero V purely for the continued support, especially as I was “late arrival” and got Vero 4K+ only 2 years ago - so such if life, I’ll take a hit on that for now.
I cannot help sensing a tad of sarcasm in the question, so to elaborate: it is a bit of a fallacy to count from the start of a time period whilst the product is still sold up to very recent times, but the SW support falls of a cliff relatively shortly after one still buys into the physical platform. It had generous support for generous time, BUT it was still sold as brand new device to many including myself - and under 2 years later it is not faded out, support ends in entirety - for a type of device that might not be bought for 5 minutes before entire new generation is considered to be purchased and so on. The overlap between an actively sold / ‘live’ HW device and the end of SW support for it (with cliff edge complete discontinuation) is, you may appreciate, quite less than ideal :)… Either one had to end earlier (but then of course new generation had to be ready and sold) or the other i.e. support timeline to overlap more with lifecycle of the device still in stock in myriad placed and actively purchased - so the one painful thing here is the timing of the two lifecycles and how they (don’t) overlap sufficiently. But such if life. It feels as if the synchronisation of the two lifecycles was quite unusual… with a cliff edge that came very soon after a given generation of physical device/platform (finally) ended. It is hard to find an analogy in other platforms where HW and SW timelines expose a new buyer to such cliff edge so soon, without proper bridging between the two or gradual rampdown and so on.
Counting from the beginnings of that generation it is and was a very generous time period, absolutely. But the devil is in the little fact that some may have bought it toward the end of a period and as a type of device was not purchased for some months or 1-2 years at most. Silly me, it was anachronistic of me to expect that while it was still a “live” and very much sold device its SW support would then ‘shortly’ after that fall of the cliff. Silly again, but assumed a longer overlap between generations therefore longer (even partial) support to exist while older generation faded out. End was coming, and was extended, much appreciated, but it is still an interesting story - someone could have bought this a year after me and find that a year later all support ended.
Sure, in the world where people upgrade and buy another generation just for the heck of it months after they bought previous version it starts to feel “normal” but call me old-fashioned… 1 or 2 years after buying something one would use long term as a device it is not (my) normal expectation to blink and find it has ended all support already… without an ample overlap, but I appreciate for very heterogenous i.e. multi-HW platform cases it’s always a pain.
So to quantify it, well how long is an ideal piece of string 
but I admit it was quite a shock that a device still being actively sold (and only bought 2 years ago by myself) reaches such a point in life cycle that all support is gone.
Re: the reported issue, indeed if it’s helpful then certainly something between these two releases has gone astray (might be inter-related, the endless “loading” whilst track already plays should not in theory have something to do with actual skipping of initial audio frames but… purely speculating).
