[Knocks]

Summary: No one on the XBMC team wants to dedicate their coding time to removing features to please Amazon.

Great response (the whole thing, snipped for brevity in reply) should be on the Wiki, it was very explanatory.

[edited for mixed up posting]

The reality is that the announcement and release of Fire TV is going to change the landscape of Android set-top boxes quite significantly. You can't ignore the fact that it costs $99 including remote. That makes it extremely competitive even with OpenELEC-based systems. I am a long-time XBMC user, and as soon as this thing was announced and people confirmed XBMC running on it, I passed on buying an OpenELEC system (which I strongly considered before) and ordered a Fire TV. Amazon is selling these things at a loss, and it's poised to become the dominant set-top box in the U.S., and then very possibly everywhere else where Amazon is present.

So pleasing Amazon to get on that little box may not be a bad idea after all. Again, if it's sold at a loss, open-source based hardware will never compete with it on price, by definition. And removing features is not a big deal. It's not like you'd be removing a whole lot of features anyway, and it can be almost automated.