That sounds like one of these high-risk, high-reward things that are great for people / projects / companies who have nothing to lose, but is not a great baseline strategy for an established market player. AV2 is here with support from aomedia and its members. AV2 will be used, and we need a production-grade decoder regardless of where AI is at, so it makes much more conservative business sense to use established approaches (language: c/asm, devteam: ffmpeg/dav1d) as a starting point. While that's happening, we can dabble in AI and other risky stuff and see if it helps. If so, great, and if not, nothing lost.

No.

How? We have - at times - had democrats in charge since 2017 and they did nothing to resolve this either. We appear to be waiting for flying pigs.

This is untrue. The rule is not about taxation, but deductions/expenses. If your expenses cover most revenue, you owe little in taxes. With this rule, a particular type of expense (software engineering salaries) is no longer deductible from revenue to calculate taxable income over which taxes are owed. So you might previously owe no taxes, but now you do. The deduction might carry over to the next few years and eventually (after 6 years) you will reach the same point - assuming your salaries don't go up and your business doesn't grow. The remainder in deductions will be returned after the business stops employing software engineers. I'm not sure why anyone would want the tax code to incentivize a business outcome that all of us would consider failure.

It should be obvious that both are pursued independently whenever it makes sense. The idea that one should precede the other or is more important than the other is simply untrue.