The program has been reducing the amount of points you could earn for a while now. It very well may be just moving the points you can earn in the rewards app to an Xbox app but I can see those points disappearing at some point.
The messenger is actually a prequel to takes place before Sea of Stars. Sea of Stars is a really great RPG but it bugged me that some of the answers to the questions I had could be found in the prequel
I don’t think anyone is surprised to hear that it does not run well on the deck. Personally I’ll be streaming the game with game pass if I want to play on steam deck