Wholeheartedly agree with everyone above.
I love Blender more than any DCC. It’s an absolutely wonderful program and I’ve been lucky enough to use it every day for the last few years. The developers are incredibly helpful and responsive, and I honestly think this is just a misunderstanding.
I will say that it’s really disconcerting that “Get/Set Nodes” were removed after them being an integral part of the 2.93 rollout that introduced us all to geometry nodes. The 2.93 rollout of geometry nodes was a prototype build so that we could all get acquainted, test the system, and see the response of the users. Now, with the next version up, the arguably most integral part of the system has been dismantled and erased under the guise of shareability. It’s a bait and switch, but I would say that this probably still comes down to a misunderstanding.
When users created posts, polls, comments, etc… to ask Blender artists the users overwhelmingly asked to keep these nodes. What is worrisome is that all feedback was ignored, or at least deferred by developers in the form of a status update…
It’s very concerning that Blender isn’t taking into account the opinion of the vast majority of artists who are actually working with these systems daily. Instead a feature that was working great has been deleted and has been swept under the rug with a statement saying “We hear you. We’re sorry, here’s a deferral to wait until 3.1 to rehash this entire argument again.” This is only concerning because it’s been clear from the beginning how the artists feel about it…
Blender artists would like both, the get/set nodes, and the other sandboxed version that protects artists from making their geo-nodes setup not shareable.
It makes the most sense to leave a “Warning: This geometry node system might have issues with shareability due to a custom attribute”. Then people will know there are shareability issues with their geometry nodes setups, and people who want to be safe will know they are being safe by not using custom attributes.
Cutting out things that make Blender more flexible is not the direction to go under the guise of shareability. We all want shareability, but not at the expense of losing the nodes that were given to us during the prototype build of geometry nodes.
Saying that we’ll come back to talk about this at 3.1 is saddening, but I had a feeling this was going to be a fleshed out battle, and I’m confident Blender will not choose to ignore the vocal majority on here.
Everyone has been clear about this from the beginning. If the get/set nodes were in 2.93 it makes very little sense they wouldn’t be able to be put in 3.0, but if it takes until 3.1 then it is what it is!
I appreciate all the amazing work you wonderful developers do!
You all work very hard and I am forever thankful for your service!