Perhaps that's why I use Linux or OSX for any serious work. Windows really fucked up the sound subsystem. I can't get anything outside of "7.1 output, maybe 1 or 2 channels in" to work without horrible hops and skips. Like Microsoft never thought I'd be trying to record 24 channels at once.

I wonder how much of that had to do with the MAFIAA...

A lot.

The switch from XP to Vista and the concurrent death of CRTs were a lot about holywood.

Sound Cards, analog screens and advanced video programming (ie: changing how the screen acts directly instead of sending pixels on an standard defined manner) all allowed people to skip DRM and also all prevented new formats from getting popular.

This is still that way, note 4k video cards and screens showed up at the same time a new bluray variation is coming out, despite tech for that being ancient. (in 1995 Silicon Graphics was selling workstation that could push in the monitor 48bit colour images at resolutions around 1080p, if you had deep pockets 4k 48bit was possible...)