I’m not really in the position to reply to your questions - not only my duties in the Company are different: the technical reasons behind this would be better explained by a software engineer, which I’m not.
However, I’m aware many users didn’t like this requirement, so I’ll try.
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From the Microsoft Framework used, which requires Aero for hardware acceleration. I would think it will improve both future compatibility and performance (some will remember the spiking issues with plug-ins’ GUIs due to their implementation of multi-core processing combined with slow GPU drivers, just as an example).
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Not able to reply to this, but the menu bar on Windows 7 deals with problems it doesn’t have on Windows 8. I wouldn’t exclude there were compromises with its design to allow Win 7 and 8 compatibility.
The menu bar is what is left of the old ‘shell’ - the main program functions need to be somewhere which is not the project window. -
Indeed, there are good reasons. Preparing Cubase for the future, assuring compatibility and good performance on current and future OSs, getting rid of restrictions which made it impossible to implement features (and requests) because of inherent limitations, are the first springing to my mind.
There is often much more under the hood than it meets the eye, and everything is much more difficult in an application running under critical conditions (like real-time audio is). We receive requests that currently cannot be implemented and cannot improve functions because of environment restrictions that demand a re-write. I hope this somewhat clears the matter.