Well, ... I have been playing with Axxon Next on and off a few hours the past few days, and ... I am part way there.
The program is huge (700 odd megabytes) and took a while to install too. Performance has been OK on backup system (win 7 core 2 quad ...). Next is really not as intuitive as I thought, and lacks some customizability plus wastes some space that could be better utilized when you are viewing multiple cams. It can scale up massively. Several processing servers. Several storage servers/arrays. Tons of cameras. Downside is that it is more complex to set up and rather fiddly to find certain things. Not unlike learning to use some professional adobe program ... or a program that has some legacy design issues. All things considered, it is not as straightforward as it looks. I've had a couple issues for which I searched high and low, rtfm, check online. Had to contact support, which was extremely rapid to respond, despite using a demo program, we're talking within the time frame of an hour, acknowledged reviewed setup data shared solution offered. Btw, getting support is a bit odd as you go through a Russian & English bug tracker / ticketing portal of sorts and then the login page is Russian, and then you're pretty much filing a bug report. Certainly a bit different.
Now that I have the continuous recording mystery solved, I've still got another issue where the FPS are half of what I set them to? And I've tried to setup a motion detection zone twice ... and the recording timer goes up, but there's no data in the "archive". So, I'll have to get the 250+ page manual out again. Which is very thorough but still doesn't cover every single detail.
First conclusion really is that it seems like a pro tool with tons of options that a trained professional will set up and have regular people just use on the monitoring side. I doubt the average person or homeowner would go through what looks to be a learning curve ahead. I holds promise for what I would like to do, but it really seems very time consuming and a bit needlessly complicated to setup. Certainly not something you're done with in an hour, which is what it took to download and install it, before setting up a camera. Maybe once I flip through the manual front to back and back to front again, I'll figure out what I am missing.