Re: fed up with FTDI
[replying to my own comments is a sign of mental disorder ;-) ]
I recall one other encounter with FTDI - this one had a driver release engineering angle. I once bought a programming dongle for Lattice CPLD's. You guessed it: the dongle contains an (original) FTDI chip. Next, I needed XP drivers for the dongle. It was in February/March 2015 = admittedly pretty late for XP, but that's what I still run on some computers in the lab (and am happy that way). To this date, FTDI still list their driver 2.10 as compatible with XP - while in reality, 2.08 already failed to load in XP SP3. I managed to find 2.06 somewhere, and that did work in XP.
As for the opinion that "FTDI is no longer needed": in the "industry" and in the tinkerer community, RS232/422/485 are actually far from extinction. Note how simple the interface is - I wish that USB was so simple to use and debug, so universally compatible. And, RS232 doesn't force you to write your own USB driver (or work around writing your own driver by using some generic framework, libusb or some such). Especially writing drivers for Windows is a tad complicated by the required MS signature (that apart from the general driver writing complexity). Even the user space software authoring tools are more restrictive nowadays, than they were in the days of my optimistic youth... Corporations are helping each other to create a wall between how far you can get in DIY vs. what's possible with technology only available to corporations. Security measures against malware proliferation? Malware authors always find a way...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
