Agreed that THead and/or their customers should have been much faster off the mark with toolchain support (they're doing it now), but there is another equally v

Agreed that THead and/or their customers should have been much faster off the mark with toolchain support (they're doing it now), but there is another equally vital aspect -- the upstream software maintainers have to agree in principle to accept patches. This agreement has been either withheld or else slow to come, with such weak reasons as "we don't support draft specs", intended to mean "specs that are never implemented in hardware". Mass production of chips with a "draft spec" make it not a draft at all in this sense -- it's effectively a custom extension, which patches SHOULD be accepted for. It's just a custom extension that happens to be 95% source code and binary compatible with the official extension.