You're not understanding the difference between "dedicated" and "official". You don't have to have a server sanctioned by the game's publisher to run a dedicated server, it's just a machine with its processes and bandwidth dedicated only to hosting one particular game for whatever clients might be connecting. It has nothing to do with whether the publisher is still supplying support for the game. Offering dedicated servers means that you have more choice in joining a game with lower latency, compared to joining local clients connected to Joe Schmoe's Home ISP, which in addition to running bandwidth to 2 or more computer clients serving traffic to youtube, twitter, facebook, and God knows what, is now also trying to host multiplayer game.

In other words, what is being proposed does nothing to address your complaints, and will be presenting you with an inferior gameplay experience in terms of ping time and latency. Not even mentioning the fact that if the person who hosts the game decides to drop out, *POOF*, they're goes everyone's session. You think you dislike joining official servers? Wait until the service of your game depends on whatever "bastards who just got the OK from their mom to play" gets to be in charge of hosting your games.

What people will remember, what everyone appears to remember or just parrot off from 3rd hand reports, was that Vista had a very mediocre if not lousy launch, primarily due to hardware OEM's who weren't ready with stable drivers (or drivers at all) and system manufacturers who loaded Vista on machines that barely met the minimum requirements.

What no one reports on, what only those with first-hand experience know, is that Vista was a perfectly fine OS around the time it hit SP1. The hardware manufacturers had up-to-date stable drivers in production, it was much easier to get the kind of hardware the Vista would run smoothly on (would you like 1GB of RAM? 2? How about 4 for a song?). That and of course, Vista's obvious advantages over the decade-old XP. XP's security was a nightmare. Any Unix admin would club a man on the head for running his system perpetually in root, but that's exactly what XP encouraged, and they have the virus/spyware record to prove it. Vista finally caught up to every other damn modern OS and set up limited accounts with UAC performing the beloved function of sudo. So much more secure by default than XP it's absurd. The hardware accelerated UI not only looks nice, it makes sense and improves day-to-day performance. Oh and hey, a 64-bit OS that doesn't suck, in case you want to actually use that 4GB of RAM (see XPx64 for a contrasting example of an OS that makes WinME look preferable).

The majority aren't going to ever look at Vista favorably, but when Win7 comes out, those that have used Vista already aren't going to notice that much of a difference. Win7 is, at best, an incremental update. If Vista hadn't gotten such negative press, it's a good bet Win7 would simply have been Vista SP2. Even its name is a misnomer; Vista is NT 6.0 Win7 is NT 6.1

I don't think you can technically call something that has been reverse engineered a copy per se, but yeah, no matter what semantics you split it with there's positively no Unix code contained within Linux.