Urgh VMware, why do this?
1. 3.5u3 was released with a time bomb that caused everyone's servers to stop on the same day. :smileygrin: I have little doubt that this was an honest mistake. They immediately rushed out a new 3.5u3, but left the API open to writes by mistake, or "mistake", which made it the same as one you pay good money for. 3rd party vendors jumped on this too.
2. Now we have 5.0. People went through the roof when it was limited to 8 gigs when it first came out. When everyone ran for Hyper-V and XEN, they quickly upped it to 32 gigs, and made this "mistake".
Perspective: Around the 3.5u3 time, Hyper-V and XEN had just started their full frontal assaults, and were gaining a lot of mind share. VMware got a new president, who came from Microsoft, who MAY have taught them how to make "mistakes". Microsoft makes lots of "mistakes" like this. They get people to use the product, increase their market share to dominant levels, and then increase their revenue without raising the price by fixing "bugs", forcing their products to comply with "best practices", and "improving" their licensing to make things "simpler". If you want a case study, look at the history of Microsoft Small Business Server. Therefore it does not necessarily follow in my mind that these are bugs. They might have just been "bugs". 
Nobody has the courage to say,
"We've risked and invested a lot in our product, realize that the initial excitement of lesser products has worn off now that people have actually tried to use them in a live environment, and know you're hooked on our products like a junkie looking for a fix. Processors are getting more cores, each with more power, and memory is getting cheaper all the time. We want a larger share of your increasing ROI because we can get it, and believe we deserve it."
If they can get it, it must mean they deserve it. The only reason their competition can brag that they aren't doing this, is they can't. So it's a card game, and we're both trying to skin each other. Meanwhile, CITRIX and Microsoft are looking over our shoulders so see if they can get into the game and still make a buck.