An analogy:
1. The BBC, in partnership with Panafonic, develop television programming methods which work perfectly on Panafonic TVs.
2. Sonny and Sumsang develop TVs which also work perfectly with the BBC's methods.
3. Panafonic send a remote update to all their TVs, and urges the BBC to encode their transmissions so that only TVs with the remote update can translate their programs. The BBC, incredibly, capitulates, and anybody using a Sonny or Sumsang TV can no longer watch BBC.
Wait a minute. That's barely an analogy, that's fact, minus a couple of search/replaces.
I've also developed a cheap, silent Linux ION box with XBMC, and it plays literally every medium I've ever come across without problem. Except iPlayer (Flash's CPU-heavy non-Linux-friendly version skips like an 8-year-old girl riding a kangaroo). I've had several people ask me to make them a box, and I've been eagerly awaiting the Flash update (proper video card usage) or, better, the BBC update (OSS support) which would make this feasible. Instead we get this.
I kind of wish I'd know about the iPlayer plugin before this thread. Then again, I'm glad I didn't get used to it before it was pulled out from under us.
Addendum: My box also fails spectacular with YouTube, of course. But then that's one of its selling points.