admittedly I do not try to remain current about such things (after a quick glance passed on AA2, took about 18 mnth after release of 3 to pick it up . . . my opinion this is all part of the if it aint broke why fix it) but from where are you picking this up?
while admittedly
this is focused on the 'big' news of a migration to Mac, which considering Adobe's current relationship with Apple in general is a little curious, but the only possible in the know word (people who might actually know have all signed non-disclose agreements) is that AA4 for Win will support same feature set changes as the one for Mac.
Audition is a mature product, Adobe updates by schedule and is relatively slow (which is not necessarily a bad thing) with explosion of VSTs there is simply less marketing pressure to update purely to add an isolated feature. While implementation is different in AA one of big reasons I did upgrade to AA3 was frequency space editing which I already had via plug ins in other software. Additionally with AA3 (for me) Audition finally supported direct to disc recording (but by this time I had already discovered Reaper (which was far from my first direct to disk recording app) and again that feature by itself was not enough to get me upgrade. Additionally processes 'upgraded' in 3 merely mimic'd (by way of licence agreements) ones I already had from Izotope (but for some reason not the Mbit dither)
I'm not entirely sure where the idea came from that you have to upgrade a software version just because a company puts a new number on it. AA1.5 was already mature, things i need, side chain compression, functional on the fly automation, direct disc recording were supported by other apps I already owned that worked well with audition. I am not sorry I picked up AA3 . . . I do not use NR a lot, but the AA3 approach is a bit different then any of the other offerings of which I am aware. If I have to use NR I typically use both AA and
Izotope Rx and they seem to compliment each other well. . . but AA3 while it seems to use multicore processors with some efficiency is significantly slower, on faster machines, ones with more RAM then AA1.5 (this is not necessarily always a bad thing . . . because doing something right can take longer then just doing it well enough to get by) . . . but I was still surprised at how slow AA3 was (compared with AA 1.5). My biggest complaint about AA3 has more to do with Adobe then the specific application. I have never understood Adobe's fascination with and dependence on the Win registry (which might be one of the reasons for AA3's lethergy). When I have a problem with AA (and with CEP before) it can almost always be traced to a registry conflict. The extent to which the registry is now used more or less guarantees that I will have issues any time I alter a system significantly. aa dependence on Windows schizophrenic registry makes it much harder to back up the program (not data). My biggest issue with AA 3 is with implementation of XML files (used for anything a user modifies), I have found the implementation to be very poorly written code (in AA) or Adobe's dependency on them to be insane . . . and they are one of the many things Adobe will not talk to an isolated end user about, so there is little way to see if in AA v4.x XML implementation is less f*&ck'd up.
Even as apps mature and crowd more features into them I still do not see the point in trying to find one app to do everything. When I need sophisticated MIDI tracking or editing I still use an app that has been out of development for nearly 15 yr. I had a minor (in some ways) update so that it would install, load & run easily under XP. But Cakewalk is the only thing that ever came close to its features . . . but even that was never the only MIDI app I needed. I do not want Adobe to clutter AA with poorly executed MIDI features. It's multi track audio is in some ways weaker then other apps but it is still one of the most cost efficient Audio Editors on the market.
I suppose main point is that just because AA 4 gets introduced there is no particular reason to ever stop using AA 3, until the OS or hardware you use are no longer compatible. Learning to parse when a supposed upgrade is more then marketing speak and provides new or different tools that you need is not easy, but particularly if you are trying to be a 'pro', make money from the tools it is a necessary skill. As important as learning to use the app in the first place
