On the other hand, I'm not as optimistic about open-source BIOSes like Coreboot, whose only reason for existence seems to be "it's open-source!" --- that project has been around since the last century, yet still lacks any actual GUI/TUI for configuration, like any other BIOS has had since the late 80s.

But you have to take software seriously as something that can improve a system, not just a cost centre to be minimised where possible, and an embarrassing source of problems that will ultimately end up in the newspaper or worse.

I'd dispute it being over-engineering: media keys tend to control a mix of hardware and software (OS) features (looking at asus keyboards on the internet I see audio volume, mic mute, fan speed / perf governor, display off, brightness, projection mode, touchpad off, sleep, and airplane mode).

Given this, an OS driver is a requirement, and the OS further needs to access the hardware for obvious reasons.

This means you can either implement everything uniformly in driver (just bouncing from the interrupt to a hardware operation in the case of hardware features), or you can mix the implementation between firmware and driver.

Unless you have a very good justification to do so (which I'd very much dispute the existence of for gaming-oriented ASUS laptops) the latter seems like the over-engineering.

Brightness control has always been in ring 0, or -1 when it was still exclusively SMM.

I don't know what you're on about. What "FUCKING SUCKED" about not having to worry about what the OS does, if it does anything at all? The OS can poke the EC if it wants to adjust the screen brightness, fan control, or whatever else. Otherwise the EC takes care of everything.

Windows handled all of these on CPU 0 so it worked by accident

...and if it was handled by SMM, Windows doesn't need to care at all!

Then again, I'm not surprised at your misdirection and half-truths given you've been essentially shilling Treacherous Computing and Restricted Boot among other hostilities.

Edit: and as if destiny itself wanted to show why needing an OS and accompanying mess of drivers to do something simple is a bad idea, especially for Asus products in particular, this shows up right on cue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43951588

[0] https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkLight

I think putting in key backlights made the previous spill-proof tray design not viable, so it's not a pure win and I could see why they tried to hang on to the old design.

Old Thinkpads could survive repeated spilling of drinks on their keyboard, the only laptop I've seen to cope with that. There was a tray underneath the keys with a drainage hole all the way through the laptop, that way the liquid didn't reach any zappy bits.