Etronics made those changes in the factory - replacing space reserved for amps in the R-965 receiver with balanced outputs and DVI switching - and then did a lot of software revisions to support the DVI switching and the expanded bass management (and to clean up the interface in general). I'm not saying changes like that are impossible, but do you see Sherwood offering to retrofit P-965's with these features? Nope - because the costs involved in retrofitting those existing units would be large enough that nobody would want to do it, making it easier to either stay with what they have or have a separate product entirely (call it the theoretical P-975). Making additional changes to the 990 by adding entirely new boards is certainly feasible, but unless they had capability built in to easily accept "slide in" cards (think ISA/PCI/AGP slots on PC's) it is going to entail work that 99+% of 990 owners are not going to be able to do themselves. As for letting folks dig into the 990's software and "hack" away at it, it is an interesting idea in theory that might yield some interesting features - if Outlaw were able to get permission to somehow develop an SDK, it would be a groundbreaking move, but I would not be a bit surprised if Etronics either refused to allow it or attached a pretty nasty price tag to it. And even if they did come up with an SDK of some sort, how many of the 990 owners would be able to make use of it. I'm a mechanical engineer - I know my limits, and re-writing the code that runs my surround processor is way beyond those limits. There are likely to be more owners of something like the Roku (with a much lower price tag plus a network interface and the more nebulous feature set of a media server to offer a greater degree of "hacking") who can dig into some software and come up with something new. Heck, look at the Xbox - a large enough user base achieved a great deal of "hacked" functionality without any official support (and, in some cases, active opposition) from Microsoft. (Of course, that could serve to reinforce the theory that "hacking" a surround processor is improbably - the Xbox is drawn almost directly from off-the-shelf PC hardware and software, but the equally or more common PS2 and Gamecube have not experienced the same "hacking" because they are designed like most consumer electronics.) Would Outlaw be better served fighting for a way to provide some hugely expanded software access for the benefit of a couple of users, or should they focus on making improvements (such as speaker configuration settings, or finding a way to incorporate nifty new discrete commands via RS-232 or third-party universal remotes) that benefit all users? I can understand your interest in the former, but I think the overall customer base will benefit much more from the latter.