Thank you for the compliments and for being the first to post in the Slitheris forum. As you may know, one of our goals is to combine the features of both products at some point into a NEWT Pro v4. Until then we're working to improve the Slitheris scan engine in its own version 2.0.
The promotional price was only $16 less for the 256 device/Class C license and just $30 less for 500 devices. As it stands a 256 device license is only $95. We feel that's reasonable for what it does. Version 2's cost will likely double due to the planned improvements. All upgrades are free, so you're saving more in the long run.
We're glad you mentioned grouping of multi-home and clustered systems. These two features are on our list for version 2. We've gotten multi-home worked out in our internal tests, but haven't yet explored clusters. We'd like to set up a test cluster at some point, and perhaps you and others can help us with testing.
Slitheris currently only uses a "public" Community String for SNMP. We may soon add multiple strings to version 1, but this and credentials for PCs/Servers are planned for version 2, along with many other great features.
Improving Device Type classification is by far the most ambitious goal for Slitheris v2. We're pretty excited about it. Knowing what a device is would be invaluable to many, which is why we decided to include it as a "Hint" in v1, even though it's still highly experimental. Other planned features include faster network scanning, basic automated scanning, full support for large IP ranges with better ways to manage them, a database backend, a real manual, improved GUI with actual options, more realtime feedback and a few others we can't mention here.
Our primary goal with Slitheris is to give everyone the best network overview possible, quickly, with the least amount of effort. We hope you and others get where we're going with it and find it useful enough to fuel its development by purchasing.