Looking for a good tutorial on how to setup the control panel. Have you found any?

Are you joking - a video tutorial on how to use train products ????!!!!! Only a few manufacturers have some videos and they are fairly poor. Most videos are in German and the videos supplied by generous 3rd party persons are very few. One exception is Rudy with his tutorials on TrainController - they are exceptional. Thank you Rudy.

Why can't the manufacturers produce more tutorials instead of spending money trying to promote their products, spend the money on tutorials and then the customers can use their products more easily. Producing written manuals in English with direct translation from German is a total waste of time and money.

What we need to see, is that all the CEO's of these companies come out of their ivory towers and spend some time using their products. I believe the owner of Fleischmann (Mr. Fleischmann) actually did this with the steam locomotives - he only believed in steam locos. Unfortunately, the bean counters of the company disagreed with his practise and eventually he sold the company. It's sad that the world has come to this point, that profits are paramount and that quality of product is least.

When I spend the sort of money a cs3+ sells for, I should not have to spend extra money just to get the instructions it should have come with in the first place.

It's a disgusting practise designed to extract money and nothing else.

The software updates in the CS3 are for free, despite there is a lot of work to create the updates.

We can argue they could be better or different, but the work is there and Märklin has a cost to produce it. This cost needs to be covered.

We can think it is covered by the subsequent CS3 sales but the fact is that the already current owners also get the benefit of it.

I think in the manual as a useful tool that helps (I mean what we pay, helps) the development of new code for the CS3.

I don't know if Märklin management thinks this way or if they are just pricing the manual itself...

I think the analogy to buying a computer or a tablet pointed out by David Dewar is apt. If you buy one, you will get a tutorial covering its basic use. You won't certainly get anything that would help you to create software on it.

Automating the behaviour of a complex digital layout is in some ways comparable to programming real-time systems. Creating a good tutorial covering the full depth of the topic would be a nontrivial exercise that probably would make no economic sense for a company such as Märklin.

When Märklin came along with more advanced control structures for event scripts in CS3, didn't they publish a disclaimer stating in effect that "this stuff is tricky, and if you use it, you are on your own"?