this is silly. they only did this because of the changes in hardware/processor/architecture. hypothetically, if a ps5 comes out in 4 years and has an x86 and similar hardware, you'd better believe the OS will be a new version of whatever is on ps4 at the time and will be much more feature complete
No, it's not silly. Feature Creep is a deadline killer. The potential ease of transition from PS4 to PS5 has nothing to do with the transition from PS3 to PS4 so I don't even know why you bring that up - it's apples and oranges given the PS4 firmware was 'from scratch'. So yes, it's perfectly understandable (and wise) that they'd prioritize the feature set and we wouldn't get every feature on the PS4 at launch that the PS3 had at the end of its lifecycle.
Anyone who has ever worked on a tech project before should understand that we wouldn't get 'all ps3 features + more!' at launch. But don't worry, we'll get most/all of them, plus extras, through patches during the systems lifetime. As it should be.
Do you have a vita? Works perfectly every single time. I swear I've had it hold on to my game even when the battery died.
Gives some hope that they will make it work that well for PS4.
The Vita will save your state even if your battery dies while playing. And if you're in suspend state, not only will the battery last ridiculously long, it'll also protect your state. It's amazing. Not sure how the ps4 will fare in that regard since battery power outage is predictable whereas your power going out isn't... but perhaps it'll save your state to the drive and reload it if there is a power outage? I guess we'll know soon enough.
That's great and all, but when your new console is missing basic features that your old console had then those should be a priority over than new improvements. Taking away features to give us new ones is lame.
Features don't get priority status simply because they existed previously on older systems. I mean, heck, there's a better than fair chance the people working on 'complex' features like suspend/resume and remote play optimization aren't the same people working on the UI. There's also a chance they've determined something like friend notification has other dependencies to make it work well (for example, adding functionality to allow you to group friends, then mark which groups should give you notifications) that would make the project bigger and thus take longer.