Thank you for your reply Christopher. Your answer made me think a bit more about this.
Like you, I don't do contact analyses in Creo/Simulate; in that case Abaqus is my tool of choice. Part of the problem here may be that the Simulate users grow over the years, and so does the complexity of their analyses. So they run into really advanced problems at times. Especially in new features that are quite advanced, you can expect to run into some bugs.
However, this should not be an excuse to let the software quality slide. Not everyone has the option to use different software, so all the features in Creo should work properly. This is hugely important for Creo/Simulate, because the majority its users are not experienced CAE users, and so they are likely not to notice when something is wrong.
If something does not work as it should, an prompt warning should go out to all users, and a fix should be expected within a reasonable amount of time. (What is 'reasonable' depends on the severeness of the issue and the complexity of the fix). This is where PTC is seriously underperforming. See for instance the issue on the non-symmetric results on symmetrically loaded conic parts in this topic.
I suspect the majority of Simulate users could care less about results being off in an analysis with finite friction contacts. But I hope you agree that PTC should make more work of announcing problems and releasing fixes for them, and I hope the TC will help point this out to them.
Hearing Erik announce that he is losing faith and is considering looking for alternative software is quite shocking. He is the national Mechanica guru and has given enthusiastic presentations on the software for decades. He does things with the software that other people did not think were possible. For him to lose faith in the software is really incredibly bad.