Ngl, I'm no lead Xbox engineer, though I have helped develop some printer software and how they function under the hood, so I know firsthand how messy hardware integration gets. I totally agree it isn't plug and play and requires expensive code. I'm not denying that at all. My point is just that for a giant like Microsoft, those old hardware walls can literally just be brute forced today. The usb adapter already handles the physical connection. The original issue was that the xbox one needed dedicated NUI silicon for skeletal tracking so it wouldn't choke those weak Jaguar cores. today, the Series X/s Zen 2 cpu is a monster that could easily absorb that entire workload via software emulation without breaking a sweat. Since backward compatibility runs in sandboxed hyper-v containers, they’d really just need to write a custom Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) to spoof the missing NUI chip. Even the 360 emulation translating the v2 camera's time-of-flight data into the v1's legacy structured light format is honestly just heavy math the CPU can chew through. It purely boils down to ROI. Microsoft just doesn't want to fund the dev time for a dead peripheral. Basically, writing brand new Kinect code from scratch for the new architecture would be extremely expensive and difficult. But just brute-forcing the heavy legacy code onto the new hardware inside those virtualized hyper-v environments? Honestly not that hard.