Hi there,
All of your comments can be explained by one word in the first sentence of your post - "Beta".
Beta testing is intended to give selected users a look at incomplete versions of our products, without us having to polish everything enough for general release. This lets us get private feedback from our testers to make things better, without investing lots of wasted time in potentially dead-end ideas.
For example, this latest beta generated a bunch of very useful feedback about what needs the most attention from us. Based on feedback from beta testers, some areas clearly need more work than we thought - when we officially release the files, they'll be a lot more polished because of the feedback we received.
Regarding your comments on the "4 months free" idea - having a month's free trial (4 months is far too long - the industry standard is 2 weeks to 1 month for free trials) is an idea we've explored in the past. Unfortunately, there's no way we could do it without making piracy of Hero Lab much easier. Given that our older products had an extremely high piracy rate (multiple pirated copies in use for every one we actually sold), this isn't something we're anxious to return to.
Finally - as of more than a week ago, official beta testers can now save their M&M portfolios. However, you don't seem to be on the beta test list (I assume someone in your gaming group gave you the beta), so you won't be able to save - our policy is that it's fine to show beta stuff to your friends, but not to actually give them the software. It's worth noting that this would have got someone kicked out of the beta program by many companies, so please be more circumspect about posting this sort of stuff in future.
(For our other readers - yes, the M&M data files are being beta tested right now, but they still need a lot of work before we're ready to go public with them. Stay tuned for the public preview that we'll have available soon!)