It's wonderful when the marketers of a product are so sure that their product is great and that they can consider their complaining customers incompetent. Those of us who've been competent enough to purchase and enjoy (?) Monokote in the past have now become unskilled - amazing! It's more likely that the marketers staff using / testing the current crop have never experienced the performance of the old - those of us that have don't have the patience to tolerate the current stuff. Of course there are different application techniques, seems that the marketers assumption again is that customers have devised different methods due to laziness - not that the recommended method doesn't work for certain applications (or at all with some product runs).

Having worked in a field greatly affected by environmental regulatory agencies, I can appreciate that forumlation changes are required from time to time. I've yet to see any of this sort of formulary change be totally innocuous to the performance of the product. The trap is that if a degradation of performance is small it may be deemed acceptable, then the next negligible change is OK, and the next. Of course each is compared to the former - only when the current is compared to the original is the difference obvious.

We don't have consumer watchdog groups keeping an eye on the stuff we use. Only through forums such as RCU can we voice our concerns / dissatisfaction, generally derived by costly and frustrating experience. Maybe the marketers hear us - too bad the response isn't "we hear you and will find / fix the problem" rather than a defensive posture. Sorry - I don't care to purchase a product known to have problems, suffer the frustrations the problems cause, and spend a great deal of time exchanging it (probably for some more of the same batch) while defending my competency, even if the marketer defines this as good service. It just goes in the trash while the marketer takes the money to the bank, of course I log the experience and spend elsewhere the next time.