Boy; there's a lot to respond to here.
Yeah, there are different users out there, and they want different things. When we decided to start in on OmniOutliner 3, there were at least three broad categories of users we could go for. Some folks used OmniOutliner 2 as a to-do list and organizer - they wanted one set of features. Other folks looked at the fact that we had columns and summaries and wanted us to go in a more spreadsheet-y direction.
The largest broad category of feedback we got, though, was "I really like writing in OmniOutliner, but I need to export my document to Word, or AppleWorks, or before I can show it to anyone." Many of these users were the folks that ponied up far more than Outliner costs, even at the new pricing for a tool from back in the day called MORE.
I used to do a lot of OmniOutliner support, and I cannot count for you the number of times that we got email that began "I really like OmniOutliner, but I used to use this tool called MORE..." This broad class of users was the bigger than the other broad categories, and when you're developing any application, you have to prioritize. The features you *could* implement will always be more numerous than the features you have time to actually implement.
So, yes, we focused on better presentation in our documents and on the printed page. We added tools for the folks that we know wanted those things. Those users are lawyers, students, teachers, and authors.
If you're the type of user that doesn't care one whit about what things look like, if you're the sort of user whose documents are just used to keep yourself on track and they never leave the format of your monitor, then I can understand you being a little disappointed by version three. It, quite honestly, was not designed for you as a user.
And I'm sorry for that; if we had infinite time and infinite resources, we'd have loved to develop everything at once and present you with an app that did the data-driven stuff you're after and had great presentation features. We ran the risk, however, of becoming the Mozilla of outliners, though - nifty, feature-packed code that takes so long to appear that no one really cares any more when it does arrive.
Okay. About pricing. For the standard version, we definitely had some people here who opposed increasing the price at all. However, other people felt very strongly that the product was underpriced at $29.95, and the "That's all? Are you crazy?" look we'd get at MacWorld when we demoed version 2 factored into the "what do we price 3" discussion.
We definitely do not plan to do this with every iteration of the product. Of course I can't promise we'll never increase the price again, but this was a 'fixing what we thought was wrong' decision, not an "inflate the pricing" strategy we want to adhere to every time we release a new version.
As for Pro, we had a lot to consider. We looked at the feature set, we looked at its retail competitors, NoteTaker and NoteBook ($69 and $49), we looked at our past experience selling Pro versions of our software. We offer features no other outliner does (named styles, for instance), in addition to being on par with similarly-priced apps. Of course, charging for the sum of its parts means that some folks only want one feature in Pro, and that one feature costs them the whole upgrade. Other folks, though, get a heck of a deal. And if you don't need any of the features in Pro at all, that's why we offer standard. We look at it as saving some of our customers money, rather than forcing anyone to pay for features that they don't need.
And lastly: comparison with other applications. All I'll say is that when you have multiple applications that are doing the same sorts of things, you end up with feature overlap. In some case this is out-and-out copying; in other cases, it's a simple case of parallel evolution. If you don't care a whit about styles, then OmniOutliner 3 may not be for you. We don't hate you for that fact, and all we ask is that you not hate us or our users because they do. If anybody copied anything, Tao, Outliner, and the other Outliners popping up in the last three years all copied from MORE; we just picked different features and we did it in different orders. =)