It wasn’t the only thing that got broken, but a very prominent one. They did comment once on how this came about, but it was totally to do with the introduction of the XBox version, and the new input method, as opposed to “Legacy”.
I can’t comment on this issue specifically, but I can compare it to the huge amount of effort to get rid of the totally useless “Press any key” screen that used to appear during the sim starting up. We met huge resistance to get this removed on PC. Requests were ignored, then delayed, and finally after receiving a huge number of votes on a Wishlist or Bug thread, I forget which, it was removed. Someone at MS/Asobo really didn’t want to lose that screen. It was promptly re-instated when the XBox version was released.
I’m always ready to listen to a reasoned argument from a developer on why a thing can’t be done, but that was not a technical issue, and felt more like marketing types, or product managers didn’t want it gone, and they ended up buckling under pressure.
This is more of a technical issue, but one tied up with the baggage that came with XBox support, so presumably harder to unpick.
It does however illustrate a trend.
Customers complain about an issue.
Initial response is to state they haven’t seen it in testing.
Customers can’t see how that is possible as the “thing” is easy to demonstrate.
Request users file bug reports on this, which is only sensible.
Customers do just that.
Now, it “may” get logged as a bug, or more likely “feedback logged”.
At this point, for some of these, like the download speed bug, some internal discussions take place. There could be wranglings between internal teams.
We then either get an announcement that its being worked on, or has been delayed to a later SU, or an explanation along the lines of “We’d love to fix this but…”.
With a product this big, when many fingers in many pies, I suspect there is politics at work we are not privy to, and frankly don’t need to be. We just want things fixed, and corporate stuff probably gets in the way for some of it.
I never used one, but from what I have read PC simmers were able to use console controllers pre-SU5, then this happened.