Well, Happy New Year everyone!
PowerDVD continues to play UHD Blu-Ray discs, and at least in my gear with an excellent video quality. Thus, I now think this threat is over, since November has passed and nothing happened.
In retrospect, the deprecation of Intel's SGX was admirably shameful. And I constantly ask myself when these people will learn from mistakes? To be fair, many studios abandoned region codes since their DVD releases, while others continue to insist with codes, despite region-free standalone players being openly offered to consumers for a long time now.
Are consumers guilt of anything, other than being film lovers, seeking discs from other countries? Since movie theaters closed down or were demolished, home video is by far one of the best ways to enjoy a decent presentation of a given picture. Also, film collectors like to have the best film library one can afford, and a 4K Blu-Ray is currently the best medium, de-facto standard, to achieve that.