1. You do realize the chance of Hikvision releasing a firmware with a "shitstorm of bugs" is extremely rare right? This thread would be much much longer if the firmware really had that many problems.
2. Do you know that factory defaulting to clear any old firmware configuration is what to do if a firmware upgrade causes issues?
I would suggest to start researching and troubleshooting instead of complaining. You might learn a few things and possibly even resolve your issues.
Im not complaining,im just stating the facts if this was a official hikvision support forum yes i might complain.
Factory reset does nothing, releasing firmware with bugs happens all the time with hikvision, thats why for many models they release new firmware every month or so trying to "fix" the bugs previous firmware releases created.
As for this forum not being a million pages long, there is just a handfull of people that understand the technical details and want everything to work correctly, most people hire a company to install cameras, if they see an image at a monitor they are happy, they have no concept of what is 480p vs 2.5k
They do not understand that some
Image smoothing setting will cause noise due to a nice hikvision bug, in fact they have never seen the camera settings
They never use FTP that is bugged from 5.5.0 and after and does not work, and so on...