Has any progress been made on this issue?
I ran into the same thing last night, albeit with Cubase 7.5, and was about ready to tear my hair out once I saw this post. I agree, it’s ridiculous that we don’t have a license to the product which we have been using, and it should at least be made plain and clear that the base install included with Cubase is not eligible for upgrade. If it was, that’d be fine, we could just purchase the full version. But now we have paid for useless licenses.
I was really looking forward to playing with R2, too…
Anyway, that’s my rant 
. Mic dropped