I wish I could recall the links to the posts and articles, but if you trust my credibility at all as a 58-year-old musician/business owner who spent most of the '90's in the software industry, in everything from startups to Adobe, I'll tell you that the situation with plug-in specifications and compatibility is probably not what you imagine.
Even (especially) with the latest, VST3, if anyone thinks that Steinberg and other industry players (or even plug-in vendors) sat down and worked out the details of how VST's and DAW's should work together, then wrote out a spec, went over it checking for omissions and errors, and finally published it, then as errors and inconsistencies were uncovered by other companies and plug-in vendors, Steinberg was alerted and those changes were incorporated into revisions of the spec, then I must now inform you that the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny were actually just your parents leaving you money and candy.
It probably went more like:
Scene: Offices of Steinberg, 3 Months before Musikmesse 1996
Sales: "I think we can sell more copies of our new pluggy-inny Cubase if we let other people make plug-ins for it too."
Marketing: "Great idea! The new version with the plug-ins! Let's let everyone make plug-ins for it! We'll be legends, it'll be the new MIDI!"
Management: "Hey, people who chose coding and not technical writing as their career, give us the specification for the plug-ins so that other people can write them."
Engineering: "That's insane, we can barely make our own that don't crash the host, and we don't have it all written down in one place, it's in the form of comments in the code!"
Marketing: "Ha, ha, you geeks have a great sense of humor. The spec must be ready for our presentation at Musikmesse. We're calling it VST for 'Virtual Studio Technology.' And don't worry, the outside vendors' plug-ins will all be certified by our QA process."
Engineering: "You're insane, Musikmesse is in 3 months and furthermore our QA staff can barely handle testing our own products with the resources they have."
Management: "Just have that spec ready for the presentation at Musikmesse. Even if you have to write it on a co*cktail napkin and hand it to them, it will be ready."
A couple of years pass....
Scene: offices of an unidentified other DAW company
Other company's marketing: "Cubase got such a huge head start on us with that VST thing that it's become the friggin' standard, we have to make our host support VST's because people have these huge libraries of them. And plug-in houses don't want to code for DX."
Other company's management: "Hey, engineering, this is the VST spec from Steinberg, we will be showing off how our product can host every VST ever coded by anyone at Winter NAMM this year."
Other company's engineering: "This is a series of German swear words written on the back of a co*cktail napkin from Steinberg's Musikmesse booth a couple of years ago and Winter NAMM is in 2 months."
OCMgmt.: "Ha ha, you geeks have a great sense of humor. It's the full VST spec. Steinberg says so."
OCEng.: "Steinberg has no incentive for our host to be able to run VST's. It's the opposite. There's nothing in this about crash protection, memory management, preset management, default UI, installation location, sidechaining, UI scaling, they barely tell you how to get audio in and out. People will blame us when the things fail to load and/or bring our host down. We're at the mercy of Steinberg and the plug-in developers. It'll be a testing and support nightmare forever."
OCMgmt.: "This is the VST spec. We'll be showing off how we can host every VST on the market. I have faith in you."
(I made up the foregoing drama based on reading KVR and Wikipedia and my own experiences as a QA engineer testing a photo editor that was advertised as being "compatible with Photoshop plug-ins." There is a financial incentive for the company who creates the spec to make it difficult for their competitors to use it. Cakewalk and DP and Samplitude and FLStudio and Mixcraft get reps for being "buggy" and having compatibility problems, bingo, less competition for Cubase. Poor Mixcraft couldn't run a VST3 without crashing to save its life until the most recent version, 9, and Mixcraft is a stable program. Sampletank 3 never has been able to run for more than about 10 minutes without crashing in either CbB or MX. I'll bet it works a treat in Cubase.)
From reports, it didn't get any better with VST3. Maybe they added plugin-based sidechaining to the German swear words. From all I can gather, VST3 is the "New co*ke" of plug-in formats, for those of you old enough to remember that marketing debacle/accidental success.
As for some plug-in vendors being dix, well, some of them are virtually one-person operations, and being good at coding does not necessarily, or even greater than 50% of the time, in my experience, go hand-in-hand with being good at dealing with other people. They're not all as personable as Noel! I am a one-person operation myself, and one of the reasons for that is I don't want other people telling me how to do things I feel passionate about. If you're even an average coder, you can make a fortune working for any number of companies and not have to hassle with the things you have to deal with as a business owner, and have retirement and health benefits as well. So why have your own company?
Many engineers are, as they say these days "on the spectrum," and one of the things that goes along with that is difficulty in reading and conveying emotions. Being on the spectrum is often an advantage when it comes to the main work of coding, but a disadvantage when it comes to things like hashing things out with engineers at other companies. They can read to neurotypical people as rude and abrupt. They want to focus on the important thing (which would probably be the signal processing algorithm) and get annoyed by "peripheral" things like host compatibility.
Larger companies can hire people to act as a buffer between the coding talent and the rest of the world. I've had that role at a couple of companies. I felt like the "Jive Lady" in Airplane! "Stewardess, I speak geek." One-person operations don't have that luxury, so it's the world talking directly to the programming genius.
In the end, what works for ensuring compatibility is if the plug-in vendors feel it is worth their resources to help ensure it. Whenever possible, on forms or questionnaires, I let the vendors know I use Cakewalk. I put it in my sig on recording forums so people can see. I use Cakewalk and I buy plug-in licenses!
