More like well player PR team, they failed to fix every single issue. They couldnt even let him have the home button fix, something that sounds like a simple script I could write in AutoHotkey in two minutes tops.
Surface team looks like a committee full of control freaks. cant give users control over home button, cant give users control over pressure curves (they brought two HARDWIRED tablets instead of writing configuration tool?).
Does your two minutes of effort also include regression testing? Did you verify that all aspects of the OS and applications which depend on the home button having a specific behavior continue to function within OS-guaranteed response times? Have you done user testing to ensure that the delay after lifting the stylus meets with user expectations and doesn't seem like the OS is frozen? Have you met with the hardware team and verified that the lift stylus event is 100% reliable so that temporarily disabling the home button doesn't run the risk of permanently disabling the button? Are there potential race conditions such that the stylus up/down events are received out of order? If in-order reliable events can't be guaranteed 100% of the time, have you implemented a suitable watchdog-style timer to catch the cases where the event isn't properly received? Has that been fully tested?
Did you update the specification documentation with your modifications so that future developers can consult the updated specs in order to understand the impact your home button changes may have on their area of the OS?
Or I guess you can slap in some two minute script and call it done, but I'm glad you're not building my operating system.
Process you described produced permanent hot corners that couldnt be disabled (lower right one still cant, even in W8.1) and hardcoded inconsistent WM_SYSKEY acting differently depending on application you run (ignores bindings when Task Manager has focus).
Less choice is never a good strategy when it comes to UI.
"They're planning on distributing a pressure curve configuration tool," seems like a much stronger statement than the article's actual statement, "What they proved was that MS could release an app that let artists adjust the pressure curve to suit their style. They assured me this is something they want to do."
It may have been specifically coded as a "proof of concept" against a pre-release version of the OS, in which case it would have been very foolish to just chuck it on the machine he depends on for his livelihood.
Try not to be so arrogant in future. For Linux devices you could have developed this yourself (and assumed due responsibility) but under OSX/iOS the dev team wouldn't have been nearly as receptive to his issues.
Surface team looks like a committee full of control freaks. cant give users control over home button, cant give users control over pressure curves (they brought two HARDWIRED tablets instead of writing configuration tool?).