Countable is not the same thing as plural or having a plural. It also has to do with whether a noun takes an article or not. In this case you can't say "Future looks bright." You must use an article or some other determiner, ie. "The/Our future looks bright." Some countable nouns are never or hardly ever used in their plural form and "future" is one of them (except of course the technical, financial sense). Although it may be possible to find some examples of plural use, everything I come up with either sounds wrong or stylistically bad. I can maybe imagine a case where two different scenarios are described for someone's future, either one of which might happen, and then the person sums it up by saying "...and those are two very different futures." That sounds (barely) passable.

In the "Operational design" thread it's just obviously a typo or misprint or OCR error for "features".

Weshalb? I don't know, but I assume the same holds true in most languages - that certain nouns are just not, or only rarely, used in their plural forms. Duden also marks the plural of Zukunft as "selten". By the same token some nouns are never or rarely used in their singular form - pants or binoculars, for example.

Edith just told me I should go and read the other thread...

Danke, wupper! Dann hat CD nicht Unrecht, sondern ist einfach zu ungenau. Der Zusatz 'rarely used' wäre hilfreich.

(P.S.:

Countable is not the same thing as plural or having a plural

Allerdings hängt das eine mit dem anderen zusammen. 'Money' (u) hat auch keinen Plural, wenn man es im Sinne von 'Geld' und nicht im Sinne von 'Gelder' verwendet.)

Was ihr alle zu übersehen scheint:

Sowohl Merriam-Webster als auch Collins haben gesonderte Einträge für future (plural noun) im Sinne von "Termingeschäfte". Das ist auch die einzige mir bekannte Pluralform für "future", nämlich die Termingeschäfte (und nicht die Zukünfte). Auch Oxford Dictionaries drückt es so aus:

Oxford: future 2.

• futures (Finance) 

Contracts for assets (especially commodities or shares) bought at agreed prices but delivered and paid for later. Compare with forward (sense 2 of the noun)

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/...

Collins: future 6. plural noun

When people trade in futures, they buy stocks and shares, commodities such as coffee or oil, or foreign currency at a price that is agreed at the time of purchase for items which are delivered some time in the future.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/...

Merriam-Webster: future 3. something (such as a bulk commodity) bought for future acceptance or sold for future delivery  —usually used in plural

grain futures

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/future

Having free will means having the ability to deterministically evaluate several possible futures open to you, depending on which of several courses of action you ...

01.07.2018 - The scenarios, which will project several different futures for the region based on what priorities we set, will be released later this year.

19.11.2014 - If man is born in freedom, with infinite possible futures open to him, the fact of living at all will require that he is locked out, finally, from nearly all ...

This short essay tries to set the new debate that Fischer provoked on possible futures for the EU in the context of developing thinking in the UK about European ...

This session will explore new conceptualisations, forthcoming trends and possible futures for the internationalisation of higher education. We'll discuss fresh, ...

A perfectly acceptable use of plural “futures” in non-finance and non-sci-fi contexts is illustrated in examples like those above.

Um mein Beispiel aus dem anderen Faden auch noch mal hierhin zu kopieren:

[futures] geht [manchmal] im Plural, [z.B.] in SciFi und alternative history:

Out of all the possible futures, this was the one where he was most happy.

Danke für deine Ergänzung. Was die Kollokation mit 'possible' angeht, gibt es eine ganze Menge Google-Treffer. Sie wird wohl sehr häufig verwendet.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-...