I'm surprised they've gotten away with shipping preloaded SD cards for so long. That was a risk waiting to blow up in someone's face, though it obviously isn't fair to be going after some guy rather than the distributors.
I love my Pro 2, best pad I've ever had, but I love it enough that I have no real need to spend $70 on an upgrade. This sounds excellent for anyone who doesn't already have one though.
Not sure I get the point of removing the face buttons though. You shouldn't need to physically rearrange them in order to remap them. I just use the Pro 2's profile switcher button to swap layouts, and I see that button is still present, so I don't see why I would want to do it the hard way.
These things do take time, but not an entire decade. A decade ago, Marvel was still in bed with Capcom, and ArcSys was not yet enough of a household name to be able to negotiate something like this.
I am aware that some corporate infrastructure is hopelessly tangled up in legacy systems. But we are talking about consumer support here, which I know you know is very different.
Edit: Y'know what I'll properly expand on this. The Steam Controller failed because it tried to replace vital functionality people expect from a controller. The Steam Deck learned from this mistake and just supplemented that functionality.
TBH, the way I see it, the Steam Controller was designed for games I don't want to play on controller, while being bad for games I do want to play on controller.
I think there's an argument to be made that some level of retention strategy may be a necessary evil in today's market, especially when all your competitors are doing it. No developer wants to run the risk of letting that playerbase dry up. You can have the best multiplayer game in the world, but all the brownie points for playing fair wouldn't mean much if I'm sitting in an empty queue with no one to play with.
It's fine line to walk to make sure players are coming back for the right reasons, but you do want them to come back.