I don’t like to give dead end advice so:
I promise you that jig workflows are as fast and accurate as snapmarks. They can range from simple to more complex depending on exactly what you’re doing but snapmarks are 100% not necessary.
If you have a particular workflow that you’re having a hard time translating to jigs I’d be happy to offer my ideas, just let me know what you’re up to. 
Ever onward! 
Btw technically he doesn’t say Glowforge informed you of that. He just says you were informed of it. Maybe we’re missing context from your original query to them?
I’m not trying to split hairs about your interpretation; I’m just trying to get the full picture so I can form an informed opinion about how all of this is going down, while bearing in mind that support reps may get some details wrong from time to time.
That said, the CEO’s public announcement carries an awful lot of weight. Unless you were told something different via backchannel by Dan himself I’d think that his announcement supersedes just about any other promise that may have been made, either explicitly or implicitly.
Could there be old threads in other places I’m currently not able to look into right now that have this other information for the regular beta testers?
I too seem to remember there being talk about all this and we got told that since we had it, we could keep it, no one else moving forward would get it as the data was used to make the camera more accurate and that indeed, if we had to get a replacement, no guarantee the new one could get it. Though I know there were a number who got it turned on their replacement machines and a few who couldn’t.
Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like we could use some clarification from higher up on this topic. Like the final say so.
I’d appreciate it if they delivered on all of the projects they showed in the initial videos that were promised to be delivered. Those seem to have been forgotten or they weren’t actually created on prototype GFs but on other lasers so they’d have something to show in the videos and the programs wouldn’t work with the GF software.
Or they didn’t have the license to distribute them.
I can’t speak for all of the projects, but I can at least talk about the globe lamp. When I worked on the catalog design team, we talked about using those original designs that were showcased in the product launch as design of the month options when there wasn’t suitable submissions to the catalog. I have the globe files, and it’s a mess. Basically they used the slicer addin for fusion 360 to generate separate layers, so I don’t think releasing the globe has anything to do with licensing because they did it in house. The original export sizing also doesn’t match up with what was of capable on a glowforge either. At some point I was supposed to clean it up and get ready to put in the catalog, as the ability to group different print jobs together became available. But then they got rid of design of the month, and the catalog design team, and probably any hopes of releasing those to the catalog once that was outsourced overseas.
At least the globe lamp always seemed achievable. The drone always looked like vaporware to me.
It never seemed like the globe lamp would have been difficult to reproduce. Gathering it up into one file, that might be difficult; I have no idea because Glowforge keeps such a lid on how they build their internal files. They could release it as a zip of SVGs if they wanted to, were used to having multiple files for bigger projects (see above about not telling us how to build our own complicated files)