I'm in complete agreement with Sagor. I too am a hobbyist and use whatever 8 bit MP suits my project PIC or AVR.
I've just looked on Ebay, the full Suite is going for £30, which is very cheap. Maybe Vlad isn't getting enough new custom.
It is very good but I wonder as to who it is aimed at.
It is low cost so presumably aimed at hobbyist, also the hardware projects suggest the same. I can't see professional users being interested in a DIY Serial Monior, PIC/AVR programmer etc.
If that is the case, I can see the following problems.
Arduino IDE is free and appeals to users who want most of the work done for them by using several "Includes"
They don't want too much thinking just a flashing LED.
This was where I came from after starting with JALv2. I needed to get 2 stepper motors working, their controller was fried. At first I was happy with includes but dependance on includes can be limiting especially when you can't find the one you want.
At this point you either give up or try to understand what the includes are doing. IMO quite a big jump.
That's when I started looking elsewhere. Being a low skilled hobby programmer I was reluctant to spend £80+ on a compiler but being a child of the Commodore 64 I was fairly competent in Basic.
So Arduino, Picaxe etc didn't appeal because they did too much for you. Oshonsoft seemed perfect, low cost and Basic. It also seemed to allow access to the clever stuff which was what I was interested in.
However I did find the Help to be very "tight". The examples were IMO too complex, I couldn't understand the concept being used in some of the explanations so a lot of time was spent figuring out. Since Oshonsoft seemed to be just what I wanted I persevered.
I noticed a comment from one Oshonsoft user that he was moving on as it was "too limiting". What I think he meant was that there wasn't enough built in support for hardware, i.e. Includes, although that's not what they are called in Oshonsoft. Since microprocessor direct addressing can be used and ASM can be included, I'd say the user is the main limitation.
Here is I think the conumdrum, Oshonsoft can do some clever stuff if you are good enough but those who are can see its limitations.
It is a bit too difficult for the "do it all for me" programmer who only wants a quick solution for relatively simple projects.
The unfinished routines for some MicroPs e.g. AVR's ADC & PWM mean that you have to use either ASM or direct MP commands, off putting for many I reckon.
The other Freebe competitor is Great Cow Basic. I've tried this and it is very good but it isn't that easy to use, documentation is slightly better than Oshonsoft and its Forum is very active.
To use things like SPI, you really need to know all about the SPI protocol, mainly because it supports hardware SPI. Although I haven't spent a great deal of time on it, I've yet to convert one of my programs to work with a set of 7 segment LEDs and I'm quite good with them using Oshonsoft.
I'm reasonably competent now, as mentioned before I did manage to get ADC to work with an ATmega328P using direct addressing. I would not have been able to do this when I first started and I only did it because I bought a number of AT328P then discovered that Oshonsoft didn't fully support them!
So Oshonsoft is stuck between Arduinoland and High end compilers. My guess is there aren't enough users in that sector. Maybe a better approach is to make it easier for less skilled users to get on board. Vlad is clearly a very competent programmer, but what is painfully obvious to him may not be to a newbe programmer. Move on to Arduino, or PICaxe!
I've just remembered, I bought a license for a friend who was showing interest and said he had some experience with programming. I asked a few months later how he was getting on, his reply was he couldn't understand it and had bought a PICAxe system which worked fine.