I don't know what he wrote on RC (Remote Central?) but my decade old Harmony 900 had the macros removed and I certainly can understand why some would want it. For myself I worked around that with the Denon AVR having QuickSelect buttons that stores a number of settings and I've a different QuickSelect for each activity.
Now that I just bought the Elite I see that it have macros, but have not used them yet.
The problem is that online is the only option to program a Harmony remote, so when the servers are down I'm toast.
They were never intended to be a professionally programmed remote but the activities could always be customized, even with the most basic one, from the beginning. Dealing with them was interesting, at the beginning- if someone called for tech support, it was likely that at some point, they would talk to the guy who built the first 5000 units. IIRC, they only had five people in the company at the time and it wasn't long before they made arrangements to switch to manufacturing in Asia at a much higher scale.
You should be able to add pages of additional commands, or reassign buttons that were automatically populated but aren't used- when the H1000 was introduced, I was told that I couldn't do some of what I wanted, but it turned out that I could- this included adding commands to the activity startup and end, adding buttons and renaming others. As long as an additional device is added to the remote's setup, its commands can be added to an activity in a 'sequence', which is what Harmony called it.
Harmony stopped production once before and I had decided that I needed to look into other options because my fear was that they would kill off any support, although there are some requirements for support when a company ends the life of some kinds of brand, device, etc. The first time I got the attention of someone who was farther up the food chain, it was at the beginning of the Elite life, when I wanted info about the hub's ability to drive more IR emitters, IR hubs, RF range, their use of 2.5mm jacks and plugs (we gave URC a really hard time when they used them, but apparently, Harmony didn't bother to look into it) and he contacted me about being in a conference call with him & others, including at least one of their engineers, to discuss ideas for their future devices.
This call came while I was programming an Elite for the same system where I had done some really weird things with the H1000 and its replacement, the H1100, which had more customizable buttons and abilities for its touch screen.
Even the one in the photos, which is one of the first Harmony remotes I ever programmed, could have commands added- the black part is what they called a 'jog wheel', which was rotated to find the command needed, then pressed to activate it. That was great if the wheel didn't rotate when it was being pressed, but that was easier said than done. The small off-white button has a C on it, but I don't remember what it did.
