I really think the streaming HiRes is the future of music
Unfortunately I feel you're wrong. My guess is the future of audio will be how things are right now, which is streaming via services like Spotify or Pandora with lossy audio quality. The painful truth here is the majority of people don't care about "hi-res" audio... hell most people don't care if their music is lossy or lossless audio, which is apparent how popular services like Spotify are. That's the future of music, unfortunately, not "hi-res" audio.
Not to mention most "hi-res" releases available for download and streaming are sourced from the same masters CDs are pressed from. You can literally do a spectral analysis of the tracks and see where the frequency cut off is at, which is an indication of the potential source. For example if it cuts off sharply at 20 kHz that usually means it's sourced from the same master as a CD (there is more to it, but in my own experience it's this way). Essentially I'd argue that it's nothing but a upsampled track and you're paying extra to download or stream literally empty space.
This link is a pretty good read to further explain it in technical detail if you're interested.
I'd actually also argue that most "hi-res" out there right now is nothing but a scam. Yes, there are some releases which actually are "hi-res" but those are few and far between. In fact, I'd say they're pretty rare.
Personally I don't care for streaming service support. I have over 130,000 FLAC tracks locally in my music library, so I'm essentially my own streaming service. I'd assume there's a lot of people that are in the same boat as me, using Media Center with local files and not using streaming services at all. Or they're using alternatives like maybe Cloudplay and/or are using the WDM driver. Yes, I get that streaming services are popular but at the same time you also have to respect JRiver's decision to not pursue it, especially after what happened with Tidal. Yes, they'll lose potential customers going this route, but I suspect it's not as many as you'd think.
