Actually, moving more functionality into the 3D engine makes a lot of sense. Nor is it a problem, in and of itself, if the specifications are available and the developers are willing to work on it.
Since the 3D specs for the r300, r400, and r500 cards has been released by ATI, my performance under linux (with the open source driver) has improved tremendously. I now have full EXA support, including accelerated RENDER, greatly improving compositing speed. Not only do I have the one Xv port for the hardware overlay, I have 16 additional Xv ports from the new textured video support.
The real problem is that the hardware vendors, and even the DRI developers, are primarily concerned with linux support, not FreeBSD support. So they push changes into the direct rendering manager, make sure it works under linux, and we (FreeBSD users) sit around hoping that someone ports the changes to the BSD code. At one point, Eric Anholt primarily worked on FreeBSD, generally making sure that the DRI ran just as well under FreeBSD as it did under Linux. Now he works for Intel, and guess what their primary conern is? :-)
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