Your "breaking my heart" with this again... That's two products you've "dropped the ball on" that I was really hoping you'd follow through on. Well, "C'est la vie."
Nowhere I've said we have "dropped the ball", I simply said that we'll discuss this only when WE are prepared to do it, and the timing it's entirely our own decision. Our FIRST duty, is to complete products we HAVE announced first, which is why KLAX and Hawaii 2 have the priority right now.
I ask this everwhere I shop, as it makes perfect sense for network-based server installations (remotely on multiple PC's); which saves on HDD repository space as well if its in an optical drive instead;
If hdd space is what bothers you, then just burn a DVD with our installers yourself...of course, nothing beats an HDD for the $/space ratio, which is why I've stopped burning DVDs ages ago but, if you like a DVD more, just burn it. It will be much better than a commercially printed DVD, because you'll be able to fit all our products in a single disk.
Again, since our downloads are always freely available and you can download them as many times as you wish, they don't have to take ANY space on your HDD, since you can even download them, install them, and delete them if you need to reclaim some space.
and for recovery/setup from originals, which is what I have to do without having to look for each product (& Patch) on each downloaded CD/DVD or HDD repository
Chances are, by the time you'll installing again, we'll have updated our installer on the web site. We don't rely so much on patches, just because our Full installers are always freely available and always kept updated so, when making a total reinstall, it's just easier to not even questioning which product needs what upgrades, and just download everything again.
Although, don't feel that I'm require it of you; it would be nice though.
If you really like optical media, just burn a DVD yourself with all our installers but, as I've said, it doesn't make ANY SENSE for us to SELL you a DVD, which will be exactly like the download, just unnecessarily more expensive.
It's 2010, some computers are not even coming with an optical drive anymore, it will disappear just like the floppy disk (and Yes, it was Apple that started removing FDDs, and yes, everybody laughed when they did it...), everything will be "in the Cloud" in the next years.