I'm in agreement with several parts of your comment here. I've been trying out dolphin for a couple of years now, but never really felt the push to fully commit to it. I do admit that it's development has made some progress over the years and the upcoming v8 looks even better, but I share the belief that the license is way overpriced for what is currently available. It was overpriced before v7 and I started following the v8 development, which has been ongoing for well over a year now, hoping that see more it might be worth it; now the price has changed again.

I just recently paid over a couple hundred dollars to test the v7, hoping to deploy it for a client and I found it under par along with what you have outlined above; particularly with the crappy mobile apps included in the prime license. To have to pay so much now for what's forthcoming is ridiculous to me too.

I've developed quite a few sites with WP, Joomla and Drupal. For each project, I realize that it's still cheaper to accomplish my goal with other tools, even though Dolphin has some great features out of the box. Elgg has similar social features out of the box too and it's mostly free. It appears to me that the current license fees are more for a Dolphin9 or 10.