Why I am abandoning Sonos: They are ruining the platform

I have been an avid Sonos fan for decades.... yes from the beginning I was on the Sonos wagon and loved it.    even to the point that I abandoned an in house audio multi-zone system for it.    and it was great until about 3 years ago when they started changing how Sonos really works.

Before when you had the controller remotes everything worked locally.   I could play and command everything locally so if the internet was out it still worked and everything was awesome.    It was flawless for years.   I kept buying and upgrading until I ended up with 8 rooms of stereo audio,  that's 16 speakers!   Added Sirius XM to it and it was awesome we could all listen to what we wanted!

And then something changed.   I was no longer able to listen to Sirius XM in multiple rooms,  pandora stopped connecting reliability and the speakers took forever to start playing music...    and then the connection for integration stopped working reliability.... every update to Sonos degraded the platform more and more.  To the point this morning I had to yet again reboot everything to get music and  I discovered,  oh another update,  that's why it broke again...  and they force updates on you now, you cannot disable them.

I used to be the biggest supporter of their products, but now I will not recommend Sonos to anyone anymore.    It's not reliable like it used to be,   they have constant nonstop updates that break things or take away features, and each update they get slower and slower to start music playing.   It's to the point that I am spending money to have speaker wiring installed in my current home, and have speakers cut in ceilings or added to rooms along with a 16 channel amplifier and audio sources plus control system to get reliable whole-house audio back.  I am saddened that Sonos as a company destroyed their product.  It's nothing like it used to be and seems to only be getting worse.

And I am not alone,   many professional AV companies are no longer recommending Sonos due to integration issues and they refuse to stop changing things without telling their partners about the changes until it's already broken things.     

What I thought was the future of home audio sadly seems to be dying and going back to a traditional distributed audio system is the answer once more.