Front Row 2 - Why a standalone application?

Question

Perhaps this thread can consolidate some of the various other complaints against Front Row 2 that seem to stem from the same issue that I, at least, perceive as being a big part of the problem: that FR2 is a standalone application in Leopard rather than a front-end interface for media-handling applications in the background, as it was in Tiger.
So I'm just curious and would like to hear from those who may be more "in the know" why Apple made this move? Why is Front Row "better" as a standalone application? When in Front Row in Tiger, if you watched a movie, QuickTime would be handling it in the background. If you listened to music, it was iTunes that was handling it. If you watched a slideshow, iPhoto was responsible. If you were watching a DVD, DVD Player was doing the work. In Leopard, however, Front Row handles all these media files/types by itself, and I've only seen that as a negative so far.
For example: in Tiger, a custom slideshow I had created in iPhoto would be displayed exactly as I had specified (including custom timings, photo framing, etc.) when viewing that slideshow in Front Row. In Leopard, not all those settings are carried over and the slideshow doesn't display as I've set it up (although it continues to display perfectly in iPhoto). In Tiger, all my album artwork in iTunes was displayed correctly in Front Row. In Leopard, the artwork of several albums will not display even though the album art is visible in iTunes (and via CoverFlow and QuickLook in Finder). And, of course, there's the issue that many report that music playing in FR2 will stop if FR2 is exited, or even when you just exit the music section of FR2. Why the disconnect? By having Front Row be a standalone application, it just opens the door for issues where the files/media isn't being correctly handed over from its proper application to what we see in Front Row.
While I do mostly love the new interface of Front Row (although I miss the desktop fading into the background effect upon launch of FR2), I've seen it take a pretty significant performance hit. Some HD movie trailers that played flawlessly in Front Row on Tiger are sluggish and choppy on FR2 on the same hardware. These same trailers play just fine by themselves in QuickTime, however. Tiger's Front Row properly showed previews for all my slideshows and movies almost instantly, while FR2 takes quite awhile to create previews for everything - and isn't able to create previews at all for some files (Apple's own HD movie trailers, for example).
Since FR2 is trying to handle all the media and filetypes by itself, rather than handing off the tasks to the proper applications in the background that can handle them more efficiently, it seems to become a bloated system hog. After spending about 15 minutes in FR2 going through various media, I noticed it seemed to slow down more and more. I exited to check Activity Monitor, and even though Front Row wasn't even running anymore, it was using almost 1GB of RAM. Evidently, all those previews it has to create (starting over each time you get into FR2, I might add) really start to take a toll over time with heavy use. For someone with a HTPC-Mac who wasn't accustomed to ever having to exit Front Row in Tiger - much less actually restart the machine because of it - it seems like a horrible step backwards.
So again, I'm hoping someone can offer some insights into why Front Row was changed to a standalone application instead of being further enhanced as a front-end UI for the proper media applications running in the background. I understand why they wanted to change the interface to be AppleTV-like, but I don't understand the loss of features and the backwards step in performance.

Answer 1

That's a benefit to the PPC users, of course, but I can't imagine that was a major influence on Apple's decision to do it. Would they really remove features and hinder overall performance just to cater to old hardware? That doesn't seem very Apple-like. Nor does it make much sense to handicap Front Row for everyone who does have a capable Intel Mac just so others can run it on old PPC machines (which likely can't get the best performance out of Front Row anyway, given the way it gobbles up system resources by bearing the burden of dealing with so many forms of media/files by itself all at once).
Maybe the bigger picture - which is harder to see now only a few days after the launch of Leopard - involves better long-term development of Front Row features that will be easier to implement with it being a standalone application rather than a front-end UI. So while it will be great when/if the performance is improved and new features are added, it's little consolation to those who upgraded to Leopard (and I do love most of the rest of 10.5, really) but think we took a major step back with Front Row.
Front Row isn't a big deal to those who use it infrequently, but for those who were somewhat dependent on it as a vital component of HTPC, these "little" issues add up and are pretty frustrating.