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In fairness, they painted themselves into a corner with intracate APIs designed to skip the normal hardware abstraction layers. It probably takes a ton of effort just to keep old DirectX APIs working through architectural changes.

Also, supporting 16 bit software in long mode requires emulation, and they chose not to.

I dunno about broke, if they had backported the DirectX stuff to XP there would not have been a breakage. But MS tried to use DX10 as an upsell of Vista, thus making DX9 the last directX version on XP.

What we ended up with was a whole host of game engines that stuck with DX9 to try to reach the largest possible market.

True, but compared to game console backward-compatibility or that you often have to recompile things to get them to work between linux distros made the same year, Windows is pretty damn good about backwards compatibility.

They completely changed the driver architecture, it was bound to cause some incompatibilities.