Well if you are strictly a hobbyist you have other options----By the way, the 299 is for the upgrade to 4.0 and DVD Architect---I think its very reasonable.
$299 is a very reasonable price, I don't think anybody is arguing that.
$149 is also a great price for V4 alone.
I'm a hobbyist also, so I'm in the same boat. Trying to come up with the $$ to purchase is a feat in itself. Specially since I'm Canadian, which translates to +/- $250 and $500.
This however, is MY problem, SoFo can't start pricing their Pro software for us Canadian hobbyists. :)
I'm in the same situation, and $299 is the upgrade from VideoFactory, so that might be what the original post was talking about.
I was really hoping for the same $199 upgrade that was offered to VV3. I guess I'll continue using VF2, rendering to AVI, then use TMPGEnc for encoding. Or maybe I will get the $99 MC encoder...just not sure anymore.