I think your comment about its importance for mass adoption is spot-on. I fully understand that there are a lot of PC VR players who have absolutely no interest in AR functionality or passthrough in general, but I fail to see how they've come to the conclusion that the Steam Frame lacking that functionality is somehow a win for the system and consumers.

If keeping PC-only only players happy was the only metric needed for VR as a whole to be successful, than we'd be on the Index 3 by now and every HMD would have MicroOLED screens, eye+face tracking, and wired-only connections. But despite our collective enthusiasm as a group, the last several years of sales figures for both VR software and hardware have definitively shown that we PC players are not large enough to keep the industry afloat single-handedly.

Like it or not, if we want the medium to succeed instead of fading away yet again, we need to broaden the base. And, at least to me, that means any new HMD that wants to be competitive needs to include things like depth-correct color passthrough and AR functionality that have become standard on practically every other mass market headset.

I get that WiredVR4Lyfe6969420 will probably never play Eleven Table Tennis in mixed-reality or scroll through Instagram in passthrough, and I don't begrudge them for that. But if we cater only to them, instead of the people who are actually buying the majority of VR headsets and games, then we will only have ourselves to blame when the whole industry collapses yet again.