You say "hours later"? That seems pretty good to me. This is obviously a small outfit, it would not be unreasonable for a response to take a day or two. I know one much larger company that regularly takes a week.
I won't comment about the tactfulness of the email response you received (it wouldn't be fair to either side without knowing the full details), however I can understand why they would not refund. Their website offers a 10 day free trial, and while 10 days is pretty short as these things go, it is enough time to discover whether it will install and what you think of it. This free trial is also mentioned on their "buy now" page. So it appears that a potential buyer has opportunity to make an informed choice before parting with their money.
Like you, I am not impressed with their documentation. It may be all there, but it's not well presented and not easy to find specific items. Both the documentation and the main executable (as noted above, I can't try the plug-in) give the impression of something written a lot time ago and has not seen much work since (perhaps the underlying parsing has, but the interface and documentation are far from modern).
But ignoring those usage problems and taking a look at what it's supposed to do. Their website says:
Quote:
Extensive comparative tests show that even the best performers among other editing programs correct fewer than 35% of the grammatical errors that a good human editor would find in the test documents. Editor corrects more than 70%.
(Computer programs cannot find errors that depend not on writers' words but on their meanings.) Typically, more than 40% of other editing programs’ comments on a text are miscorrections or mistakes. Editor is wrong less than 10% of the time.
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I find these figures interesting. In particular the claim that "Editor is wrong less than 10% of the time." In my testing here, as a percentage, I would guess that its reported usage items were less than 1% real issues. Perhaps they are speaking of some particular subset of grammar rules.
That's not to say it's not a potentially useful program, identifying those few items that really are mistakes is not easy and it can be educational to have items pointed out. It's never going to replace a real human editor, but as a "lint" program for English prose I do still find it interesting - maybe that's just the software developer in me.