What I wonder though is if there isn't some benefit to giving them an opportunity to demonstrate whether things are improving on their end, with the new models, or not? Your skepticism is well-deserved, but condemning them in advance, without even seeing what they have, doesn't make much sense to me. It seems both premature, and speculative.
In general I would agree, but there's the fact that very recently Siglent was caught manipulating ebay sales in an illegal manner. As to the SDS2000, they have a very long track record of promising improvement and delivering either nothing or in the best case some updates which fixed a few minor bugs while introducing new ones. Plus I found two bugs in their new v2 firmware of which at least one (trace offset from zero line lower v/div settings) has been confirmed by someone else, and I just played around with the new firmware for less than an hour. Frankly, at what, 18 months after the scope came to market, such bugs should not be present in a new firmware.
Would you prefer that they just go down in flames, and no one ever considers their instrumentation options? Or that they learn from their mistakes and produce quality products that are cost-effective and solid tools? Personally I'd consider more options to be a good thing, because it fosters competition. Without that, things will stagnate, and there won't be any incentive for anyone to keep working on increasing the "bang for the buck".
That is all well and nice, but I get the feeling that many people in that forum are cutting Chinese B-brands like Siglent and Rigol way more slack than they deserve. I guess some have that image of a small startup with young, sympathetic graduates in mind, pretty much the image of a typical Kickstarter project.
However, the reality is that Siglent is not a startup, they are not even a young company (Siglent was founded in 2002!). They are producing scopes for 13 years now, and after more than a decade in business they really should have sorted things out by now. The fact that they haven't shows pretty clear that their business model is based on decent hardware with somewhat working firmware to keep costs down, and investing in better firmware pretty much means a higher cost base with not necessarily a big enough return through more sales.
Rigol is essentially the same.
I think people should stop romanticizing these Chinese brands, and take them for what they are, which is not the "underdog that fights the evil big brands" but a business revolving about selling test gear at a very low price. Which works great for bottom-of-the-barrel scopes like the Rigol DS1000z or the Siglent SDS1000CML/CNL/X where the price makes up for the bugs and issues, and which have given beginners incredibly cheap starter scopes. But once you climb higher then things change because when people pretty much pay close to big brand prices then they rightfully expect pretty much big brand quality, and that's where Siglent's and Rigol's business model fails.