I call BS.  By all accounts they knew how it was performing in real world situations via Beta, and the developers were “yelling and screaming” at the brass to not release it and were overridden.  They chose investors over customers.  Period. 

Aiming and Providing are very different words.

We have seen much Aiming but as the folks making the promises get deeper into just how bad things internally at Sonos the Providing is not doing so well. We can see little, and leaks and press statements are not fully reliable guides.

I'm far from happy and deeply resent some of the things that were removed and don't appear to be coming back but at least the system will pretty much work, if far less so than before the disastrous update and refusal to offer a roll-back option.

Absolutely this. 
I’m incredulous about this line in particular: “uSonos] knew the new launch version of the app was missing functionality which wasn’t used by many” - the new app was missing practically everything! And they said they failed to test all the variables. Surely there was just one variable - does it work or not? 

The old App and old Firmware were working, never been given a good reason Sonos couldn't have rolled back and made this whole mess a week of embarrassment instead of a year plus long disaster.

Even putting S2 into legacy support, like S1 and calling the new App S3 or something would have been a better option for Sonos than the continuing bleeding we have today.

I haven't tried it recently but my too old to update tablets still were working in limited mode on their long expired apps.

Sonos wasn’t going to do anything that got in the way of Ace sales.  The investors would throw a fit if they didn’t update everyone to the version that supported the Ace.

I thought I had read several comments/ posts that Sonos couldn’t roll back to the old app. Are you saying they could have? 

Sonos controls the firmware and App completely, so I can't see any reason they couldn't make the old App available, even if they had to give it a new version number to get it to load.

As suggested above it may have been a marketing not a technical issue. 

The only technical reason to make the app roll back absolutely impossible is if they somehow lost or deliberately wiped out the old app’s source code repositories.
Sounds crazy but quite realistic looking back at all that happened and what they told in public in the past 12 months.
If the source code is in place, nothing could technically prevent rolling back to the 16.1 app and firmware even now.