However, those two opinions speak not to the heart of the matter but to more superficial realities. I've long been a supporter of the Mac shareware community. Mac shareware, on the whole, is far superior to Windows shareware, imho. Now we have the reality that Mac users are being exposed to less shareware. That, on the whole, is bad.
Less software is almost always a bad thing.
High quality software, on the other hand, is a good thing. No - it doesn't seem that way to me or to many of the readers who wrote in. Most, in fact, think that the quality of shareware's gone down lately. It's tough to say. Prices are going up, people are using less software, and the quality is either going down or remaining fairly steady.