So, his trial hasn't even started yet, but they're already auctioning off what they seized as part of the investigation.

There's sleazy, and then there's the U.S. Marshals.

Backwards compatibility was taken away, in conjunction with a price drop because eliminating those chips significantly lowered the cost to build the machine. I'm more than happy to have saved $100 on my PS3 to lose that.

Cross-game chat (which is what's really being asked for; plenty of games have implemented their own in-game chat), while trivial from a technical perspective, has the issue of Sony not being able to increase the memory or CPU footprint of the OS while a game is running, lest they break one or more of the thousands of existing games. So if they added that, they'd have to find something to carve out. Theoretically I suppose they could build more RAM/a faster CPU into the newer machines, but only those would be able to support chat.