ok you are SUPER misinformed about the motivation for the driver architecture change. drivers live in the kernel, and prior to Windows Vista, they had the same

ok you are SUPER misinformed about the motivation for the driver architecture change. drivers live in the kernel, and prior to Windows Vista, they had the same rights as the kernel. pre-Windows Vista, a driver could easily be malicious and exfiltrate anything it wanted to anywhere it wanted. the driver architecture change fixed this gaping security hole, while still allowing drivers to exist. drivers needed to be rewritten to accommodate LARGE changes to how they needed to do their work, and the result of that is that drivers which interacted with hardware directly no longer could, they had to ask the kernel to do stuff, and the kernel could say “no.” imagine being a driver maintainer and needing to react to this change. this change often required a complete rewrite of the driver. this is why drivers of the era were so feature-limited. this architecture change allowed kernel-level DRM drivers to become a thing, but DRM would have happened with or without any changes to driver arch, i assure you. everyone suddenly needing to rewrite their drivers is what caused drivers to appear limited in the new paradigm. it simply took time to reimplement everything that existed in the old driver model, and people wanted working drivers before everything was implemented in the new drivers.