Are you saying Rockwell plans to get rid of the Plant PAX Product?
No, he's saying that until version 5 you could do whatever you wanted with the PlantPAX library (like looking under the hood for the stupid ****ups that went past testing unnoticed). However, in V5, this is no longer possible. The instructions come locked and some are actually embedded inside the firmware of the controller.
Being the reluctant owner of PlantPAX 5 system, I must say it's **** and nowhere near DeltaV and they better not try to charge that price. Why is it ****? To develop an application you need about 4 separate programs (ACM, Excel, Alarms and colours configuration tool and Studio IDE).
Yu then have to import/export between applications until you're left with something you can start coding in Studio. Other systems have all this integrated into their IDE which gives you a lot more confidence.
They don't have a sequence viewer for the SCADA, which is common in pretty much all DCS's that I've used and with a good reason since using SFC is a right pain in the neck.
Basing their SCADA off of the extended properties sounds great if not for the dumpster fire that is FactoryTalk Linx. It's not uncommon to loose half the text on the SCADA screens when doing a minor edit in the PLC program.
My favourite was them coming out with this Bus to group the process objects. Sounds really good in theory, you group objects under another one and you command one object and it relays commands and receives feedback from them. The issue? Well, it hides an awful lot of code from you and worst, conditions for the operators to understand what happened. The other issue is that changing this structure can be attempted from the SCADA (where again it's **** because of how slow it is) or you have to reimport your project into one of the development tools (not Studio) or you run through an array and determine how it actually works and change values in that array to achieve what you want. When I highlighted this to Rockwell, they mentioned they have a tool that does this over Excel, but it's "competitive advantage" so they can't disclose it and even if they could, you'd still need the Rolls Royce of Linx to use it.
DeltaV will have **** like this where you're being penny pinched, but from what I've seen the products actually work unlike Rockwell.