The situation has not evolved : it seems that NI really decided not to build the run-time installer as before, and prefer answering support requests about package builder usage.
This is really a non-sense for me. Every SDK is always distributed either for developer of for run-time clients, and it is really better to
-do not force developers to store and versionize huge packages and perform extra and time-consuming work just to build an installer that they will have to maintain and correlate to client problems that might always use older versions according to their software update policy
-give confidence about the deployed binaries since they come from an official source
-help reduce software distribution size since we can point to the official NI installer rather than embedding a custom one
-help clients being up-to-date by letting them upgrade the run-time when they want from the official NI downloads
-help educating clients about what they need to deploy a solution, and what they really install on their machine
-help support by delegating any NI deployment issue to the official forums
So far we had no answer about the reason why the official runtime has been dropped.
