Fair enough. But what we'd be looking for is essentially a "Buy Windows 10 Enterprise now!" button. We have no interest in commercial partnering arrangements with accompanying legal shenanigans. We don't want a subscription-based anything. We don't need to tie in a load of other software and services that we neither use nor care about.

Since Windows 10 Pro isn't really a Pro edition in the historical sense, we're just looking for a suitable replacement in the Windows 10 generation. That would have to be Enterprise as things stand, because no edition below that would currently be acceptable in terms of having full control of our own systems. But Microsoft doesn't want to sell us anything close to a like-for-like replacement to the Pro editions we've used for many years with previous Windows versions, so we won't use Windows 10 as our main desktop OS.

> We have no interest in commercial partnering arrangements with accompanying legal shenanigans

There are none, you're looking too hard for road blocks! All that stuff only comes into play if you become a "real" Microsoft partner by paying them lots of money and attaining one of the competency tiers; for the Action Pack, you just give them $400/y (or whatever it is, I don't recall precisely).

Most of the points you mentioned there were not immediately obvious to me from reading either of the pages we cited above, so I'll have to take your word that there is something relevant available even if I can't readily identify it. But to be frank, if it would cost that much just to get a useful Windows 10 licence, or even a handful of them, it's hardly going to be attractive compared to the other options anyway, even if there really are no other shenanigans.

I do appreciate your time writing these comments, but unfortunately what I'm seeing so far doesn't really look any more promising than anything I've come across in any previous discussions on this subject. If Microsoft ever decides to offer a simple licence at a reasonable price for a fully controlled edition of Windows 10, and if we haven't already got everything we need from the combination of six other platforms we currently use at my businesses anyway, maybe we'll take a look. For now, it seems their business model doesn't include having businesses like us as customers, and we're certainly not going to go out of our way to work around that and give them money anyway. After all, why on earth would we?

Fair point, while the Action Pack is amazing value, it's only worth it if you're on a Microsoft stack - it wouldn't be worth it only to get a single Windows 10 Enterprise license (I think you actually get 5 licenses, as well as server edition licenses, SQL Server licenses, Visual Studio subscriptions, 5 O365 subscriptions, Azure credits and more).