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.