"I was reflecting on the possibility that we could have received nothing until the CD release."

Yes, well, that would be quite archaic a practice and quite opposite industry practice, and indeed quite opposite Xara's inherent smartness in how they seem to do business.

"Sometimes these download releases are misinterpreted as died-in-the-wool final releases that should be perfect and immune to change."

Well, nothing is ever really completed, is it? But, it depends on Xara's internal reliability and quality engineering the threshhold of confidence beyond which something goes from beta to released. To the naked eye, if there's a big banner that says "New! 3.0 or 3.2 release!", and a download now button, well, guess what.. :-)

"Hope this clears up the fallacious sacrosanct tone."

Yes. Unbelievably fallacious salacious mendacious!