I ran a startup selling controllers to make this easier, but never got much traction and eventually went back to the full-time employment world.

One problem is that games are a pretty weak application of the technology, but you need gaming-scale numbers of units to have reasonable costs.

You'll find that Kinects are powering far more exhibits and retail art projects than you'd know.

Totally agree and recognize that. But a bummer to see it disappear into the background (and thus get discontinued as a result).

Not to mention a big chunk of robotics research since the Kinect was released.

The original version worked well on Linux. They then had the skeleton detector and such in a proprietary library. I think there are ways to use the newer versions, but they messed with it all enough to make it rather cumbersome.

This [skeleton data being proprietary] is one of the nails in the coffin for sure.

I get that MS would like to keep developers into it's little Windows / XBOX box, but forcing me to keep a Windows installation for the sole purpose of using your hardware is a great way to get developers looking for an alternative.