There were way more than 10 people who read, commented on, and liked that Verge article.
Both your assumptions (that we're an extreme minority, and that Roku thinks that way) seem to be only supported by the conclusion you make from them.
All that said, putting the feature in enabled by default and seeing how many people end up disabling it would be how they could be grounded in reality and avoid creating a shitstorm.
Put another way, the best explanation for a metric not being collected is that it's not going to reflect well on the decision-makers.
A way more realistic scenario than what you suggest (i.e. that it doesn't hurt Roku, or even makes business sense) is that it's an outcome of a promotion-driven development.
Someone's getting a promotion for launching that "feature", and statistics that show that people turn it off the moment they realize it's there wouldn't bode well with that.
Instead, it appears that the new feature has a 100% adoption rate among the targeted userbase.
Modern problems require modern solutions, you know.
Yeah, we are not an extreme minority. My wife - who really doesn’t notice SD vs HD, let alone 4k, if the aspect ratio is correct for the screen - went ape when we got a TV with motion smoothing.
I said yeah, I hate that too, give me a few minutes to fix it, believe me I don’t want it.
I don't either, but you've got to be a close friend before I'm watching TV at your house, and I don't pretend that my close friends are a randomly selected portion of the populace.
Most people probably don't notice it, or just think "that's the way TVs are now".
Both your assumptions (that we're an extreme minority, and that Roku thinks that way) seem to be only supported by the conclusion you make from them.
All that said, putting the feature in enabled by default and seeing how many people end up disabling it would be how they could be grounded in reality and avoid creating a shitstorm.
Put another way, the best explanation for a metric not being collected is that it's not going to reflect well on the decision-makers.
A way more realistic scenario than what you suggest (i.e. that it doesn't hurt Roku, or even makes business sense) is that it's an outcome of a promotion-driven development.
Someone's getting a promotion for launching that "feature", and statistics that show that people turn it off the moment they realize it's there wouldn't bode well with that.
Instead, it appears that the new feature has a 100% adoption rate among the targeted userbase.
Modern problems require modern solutions, you know.