To update: I emailed Arturia and received a response that they are in fact working on a firmware update, but they couldn't share with me the expected timeline or the expected contents.
I find it encouraging that the product supposedly isn't yet abandonware, but disappointing that they won't share any more details, especially with customers who already made a purchase and are frustrated that the product doesn't live up to what was promised. I asked them to share that frustration uphill with management (who knows if they will or if management cares) but if you feel like emailing and expressing similar sentiments, maybe it'll have an effect.
Anyway, fingers crossed there's another update someday that actually does smooth things out.
I was like you but I've come to the conclusion, especially after the design/hardware limitations described by the Arturia staff on the forum, that any future firmware update, as good as it could be (and that's still a if), won't make this product as complete as I expected in the first place. I'm better off paying more bucks in the range of 600+ and other brands offer better deals for the ones of us simply wanting to use a sequencer 'on the fly' with a DAW, vsts and a couple synths, nothing too fancy, BUT it should work, fast, no time to be wasted on interface setup, and no bugs of any sort.
Good luck to all.
Willing to share what you're moving to instead? I could be convinced to pay more money than the cost of a KSP for something that actually works, but for a lot of what KSP does, I'm not sure what else in the market does it. I primarily use the KSP to record and loop multiple rhythmic/melodic MIDI/CV sequences at a time, to trigger my modular synthesizer. I can't really seem to find anything else that has multiple channels of live sequencing and looping in the same way—especially in as small a package—but maybe I'm missing something...