I think there's some confusion here - it's not FTM that's scheduled for a major update as far as I'm aware, it's Ancestry's servers, and it's not something that's happening ON 31st May, that's simply the date when they say their maintenance and upgrades will be completed, and when the disruption to FTM syncing and connectivity should be resolved.
While I agree that FTM (and for that matter, Ancestry) is far from perfect, with many unfixed bugs, poor design, inconsistent behaviour and poor performance, I still think it's better than any of the competition, warts and all. I upgraded to FTM2017 and it's still a great improvement. Yes, the sync issue is a pain at the moment, but I've been successfully syncing even during the current oranges (and between the frequent reds!) without problems, while in the old FTM2014 days I would frequently end up with syncs failed for no apparent reason, losing my link and getting in a total mess and having to upload again. For me at least, with FTM2017 those days are thankfully gone.
Sadly, from the evidence so far I don't think SMK are likely/able to make any dramatic improvements in FTM, just a few fixes, tweaks and "improvements" (some of which, such as the ability to select a tree view background colour, are in my opinion rather of waste of effort when there are still many long-outstanding bugs that are not fixed)
While I agree that FTM (and for that matter, Ancestry) is far from perfect, with many unfixed bugs, poor design, inconsistent behaviour and poor performance, I still think it's better than any of the competition, warts and all. I upgraded to FTM2017 and it's still a great improvement. Yes, the sync issue is a pain at the moment, but I've been successfully syncing even during the current oranges (and between the frequent reds!) without problems, while in the old FTM2014 days I would frequently end up with syncs failed for no apparent reason, losing my link and getting in a total mess and having to upload again. For me at least, with FTM2017 those days are thankfully gone.
Sadly, from the evidence so far I don't think SMK are likely/able to make any dramatic improvements in FTM, just a few fixes, tweaks and "improvements" (some of which, such as the ability to select a tree view background colour, are in my opinion rather of waste of effort when there are still many long-outstanding bugs that are not fixed)