Clealry Apple is not paying attention to this issue. They never seem to monitor their discussion forums for issues which is a shame as you would hope that they would care more about issues being faced by the people that keep them in business..their clients!
Let me see if I understand your position correctly...
1) You want Apple to waste time, money, and effort to monitor this "user-to-user" forum in order to support a file type which Apple neither helped to develope nor for which it owns a copyright for which the originator dropped official support eleven years ago and which may use proprietary or non-standard codecs which may have never been made available for use on a Mac, never may have been re-written for use beyond OS 9, may never have been transcoded for universal binary use, and which may or may not have survived the current 64-bit QT re-development initiative or the "legacy" codec abandonment between Snow Leopard and Lion/Mountain Lion operating systems. A better question might be, "Why are you using an outdated file container which, at best, only enjoys limited and ever decreasing native QT support for which even the Perialn development people are abandoning their support?"
2) Further, it appears we "other" users must guess at which technological version of QT you are trying to use with your AVI files, which codecs were used to create your AVI files, what support codec components you may or may not have installed on your system, as well as, what codec component conflicts you may or may not have created in configuring your system's codec component configuration. Sound fair to you?
3) As you may have noticed this is something of a pet peeve for me since these same basic issues have been brought up hundreds of times over the last decade with the same questions being asked and answered many times. Development and change go hand-in-hand with progress. If you are content using yesterday's video technology and willing to live within their limitations, then by all means don't update your hardware and software. Yes, Apple is and will likely continue to develope, improve, and/oe adapt QT video technologies over the next decade, and, unfortunately, continue to abandon codecs and features which I too find extremely useful and would rather keep but are no longer supported by new tchnological structures and frameworks. This does not, however, prevent me from constantly taking advantage of advancements made over the past few years. I am no longer satisfied with 320x240 stereo Apple device encodings and have moved on to HD video with multichannel audio/alternate audio capabilities—a multifaceted process that requires me to constantly update my content library on a recurring basis.
The best solution frankly is for everyone to submit a bug report to Apple via this link. If we all send one today, then it may help shake the tree.
Agreed. In fact this is the only "official" method of requesting bug fixes and product enhancements.
