Hi,
Sorry to hear about your adventure with Substrate.
The fact that Substrate is progressively becoming beta as well as it is a one way ticket is described in the documentation.
Not sure what version you are using but, when enabled from the project editor windows, there is a pop up describing the situation of Substrate (also shown in the documentation). If you enabled it via cvar in config file? Then this is something we cannot have pop up as far as I know (explicit choice of settings).