Poll: Do you want the internal simulator back?

I can certainly tell you the impact the decision to remove the simulator is having in our college: people are learning to dread using Quartus. Not one student I've met has anything nice to say about Quartus, and the headaches surrounding going back to the older version to access the simulator has not improved anyone's attitude. Our department chair tells us that we have no choice, as we cannot afford to license another simulator.

Since it looked like it was the way "professionals do it", myself and a couple of other students decided to buck the trend and acquire the starter version of ModelSim and learn it alone. The result: we're now three labs behind and losing ground fast, without having produced a successful simulation of anything more complex than a single gate. The requirement that everything be in VHDL (which we could easily spend a whole quarter on before producing anything useful), the bizarre inability of Quartus to consistently produce valid VHDL for Block Diagram Files, the inexplicable difference between LPM components and everything else (which we still haven't figured out), the utter lack of feedback from ModelSim when you've done something wrong, the crazy mishmash of GUI and command line functionality in ModelSim, and the near-total lack of quality tutorials available has made our life over the past few weeks just miserable.

This is the very first piece of software I have ever encountered in twenty years as a hobbyist and professional that I have not been able to coax basic functionality out of on my own. The simulator included in the older version of Quartus made the experience tolerable, if not enjoyable. The components we're creating in both graphical and VHDL formats are extremely simple. There should be a way to simulate them for testing purposes that doesn't take more time to set up than the component does!