FlipCam’s software goes from awesome to ass in one fell swoop

I’m posting this hoping that other people come across it and FlipCam gets shamed into fixing this problem, which it could do very simply.
My mom bought a FlipCam for her holiday in Italy and came back with about three hours of footage. Of course it was down to me to teach her how to use the software to then turn it into a DVD. I was initially surprised–FlipCam’s software was easy to use and even my mom got the hang of it. Very simple viewer, a bit like iPhoto, with all the videos in order, from first to last. All she had to do was select all, click make movie, and then the computer ground away, making all the little videos (from 1 second to 1 minute–Mom learned well to keep it short and sweet) into one long one. She started making one hour videos this way.
Two days later I get a call from my momz. Now all the videos are backwards, with the most recently-shot one being first in the list. So when you selected all and ran “make movie” it edited the films into a reverse order.
My first suspicion was my mom had clicked on something and omgmomyouscrewedeverythingup, but when I went to visit I found, no, the software now put the files in this order. And there was no way to simply view them the other way. The only way to make a movie now was to manually drag the files in order to an “assembly” video. When you have 150+ files, that sucks. Not to mention that each time I dragged a file, the assembly window snapped back to the top. Oh, awful. Turns out this was the result of a software update that my mom had installed.
I called FlipCam and got somebody on the line who said yes, she knows that the new version of the software does this, but “focus groups” had determined that this is the order people wanted their videos in. Really? Had anyone at the company tried this new version? No.
Other questions: can I just reinstall the software that comes with the camera? No, b/c the software is *on* the camera when you first plug it in and now that had been upgraded too.
Is there a section of the website with old versions of the software? No.
I sent in a complaint to FlipCam but got a patronizing “Here’s how to sort video for dummies” response in return. And this quote at the end: “There is no other way to sort your videos in the Flip Share program.”
Well, yeh, that’s the problem. Being able to sort both ways (earliest/latest, biggest/smallest, a-z/z-a) has been standard on pretty much every app since the ’80s. What kind of focus group fail did these guys have?
So that’s it. My mom went and returned the camera, bought a Sony instead…which has its own problems too. But that’s another post.
Hopefully FlipCam will realize what a complete ass piece of software they now have on their hands and will lose users until they fix it.
In the meantime: FAIL FAIL FAIL.