Reposted from a thread on the Community Experts forum:

I think we have to consider who the target audience is for MAX. I tend to spend a lot of time wandering the halls and chatting to attendees (since few of the sessions have, historically, been advanced enough to be useful for me**). What always surprises me is just how novice-level the vast majority of attendees are. They *do* "want to see how to connect a data source directly to a control on a page" because that’s exactly how *they* will build it. They’re not going to build an enterprise app - they’re solving a point problem that is slightly
outside their comfort zone.

Those novice-level folks want two things from MAX: introductory material so they can learn and start using new tech; inspiring material that doesn’t feature a lot of advanced details that confuse them. They want to know what will be possible *when* they get good enough but they don’t want to be told *how* that advanced stuff works, just that it *can* be done.

Those of us wanting enterprise-level material and deep dive tech sessions are in a minority. Now, I’d sure like MAX to cater to us too - and I think Ted is trying to address that (partly, perhaps, so that speakers and community leaders are more inclined to attend MAX in the
first place). MAX 2008 was better than any previous MAX in that respect but I still got more out of the Unconference as a whole than the MAX sessions.

The problem for advanced users is that MAX is very expensive for the little return they get out of it. For advanced users that are on the prerelease programs, they’ve seen pretty much everything shown at MAX - at least around the products they use all the time. The "new" stuff
at MAX that wowed me was around products I don’t use much (Alchemy impressed me a lot but many attendees I spoke to had no idea why it might be useful).

For the novice-level attendees, MAX is a bargain, frankly. They get a huge amount out of it. I’ve chatted to them (at length, sometimes) and they *love* MAX. They complain most about the very sessions that the advanced users enjoy - code-centric / deep dive how-to sessions.

I don’t know whether that can be resolved. For most folks, budget makes it comes down to just one conference a year unless you’re a speaker. My conference-of-choice to attend this year is cf.Objective() because it has deep dive sessions.

I submitted topics to Scotch on the Road/Rocks because that’s a brilliant, fun conference and I want to attend - speaking eases the cost slightly (only slightly, to be honest, unless somehow they can cover airfare which they didn’t last year).

CFUNITED asked me to speak, otherwise I wouldn’t be attending that this year - like MAX, I can’t justify the ticket price for the amount of advanced content.

For me to attend MAX, the cost will have to be low enough - unless I end up speaking at MAX or it can offer me at least twice the value of cf.Objective() (since I’ll already be spending $1,000+ to attend that in May).

** MAX Barcelona was my "Learn Flex/AIR" assignment and, as a newbie in those technologies, I found the sessions on Flex and (especially) AIR very useful. I’m not generally in a position of needing to learn a new Adobe tech every year tho’...