Personally, I feel that keeping things in perspective is important. The Reader's software is not entirely new. It has a history. Anyone who bought a Reader is an early adapter and knows that the pains of being on the Bleeding Edge.
As has been noted by many reviewers, Sony has not shown a great commitment to fixing products once they've been released to the marketplace. I can't blame them because the older model of consumer electronics did not imagine continuous interaction with consumers. Once the warranty period had expired, the company was free to move on and the consumer was on his/her own to make due with the limitations of the product.
The software component of consumer electronics has blurred the line however. Motivated by repeat sales to the next upgrade, software companies have tried (admittedly with mixed results) to fix product bugs over time and consumers are used to bug fixes. Unresponsive software companies often lose market-share to more nimble competitors (Firefox vs IE, for example). Sony's dilemma is to decide which customer relation model do they wish to follow.
This forum is a great resource but it has also encouraged the belief that Sony will be responsive to user comments (the software wishlist, etc.). It may be true that the Reader division is different from other divisions at Sony and will commit itself to improving the experience of current Reader owners. However, without firmware and software updates and without even a statement of commitment, there's no compelling reason to believe that it will happen as the some in this forum hope. Sony DOES have a history of updating its Connect software but it has updated the software to meet its corporate needs not to fulfill the requests of its user base. I think this is where the precedent set by the music division is an important reminder not to get ahead of ourselves in hoping that the most requested features will make it into the hardware that we've already purchased.
Sony has traditionally moved on to the next version of a product rather than fixing old ones and the announcement yesterday of a wifi enabled Reader makes me worry that this cycle is happening again.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9305
Its clearly a good sign that the basic format is being supported by Sony for another generation. The bookstore software will probably improve. However, new hardware means that Sony needs to allocate its firmware writing resources to the next generation model. There's no guarantee that Sony wants to spend money improving the firmware of Reader 1.0. It will almost certainly not go down our wishlist to add a plethora of new features to machines we've already purchased. If the next generation of the Reader is substantially different, its new firmware may not be backward compatible with the current model.
This is not a problem for those who can afford to buy the next version of the Reader. Its only a problem for the current user who expect dramatic improvements to the Reader 1.0 functionality.
Don't forget that firmware updates can also be used to block out 3rd party software (as Sony has repeatedly demonstrated with the PSP) and we could actually lose the functionality of RSS2BOOK if Sony wants total control over Reader content.
I don't see the need to divide users into camps of "optimists" and critics. Criticism is not a test of allegiance and almost everyone here has already bought into Sony's hardware-software ecosystem - flaws and all.
Having some historic perspective on Sony's struggle to deal with DRM content is important and I feel that any new purchaser of the Readers should read the CNET articles. There are a lot of threads in this forum about "what Sony should do for us" and these articles are a good reminder that this is not historically how Sony works. "Wait and see" is perhaps more appropriate with Sony than "hope and wait."