No, Apple can begin supporting RCS and play nice with other phones (not just Android) using a modern, encrypted, and open messaging platform. But they choose to fall back to SMS intentionally in order to market their devices as superior.
Eh? RCS is an open standard. Yes, you’re basically required to use Google’s RCS endpoints at this point unless you want to host your own, but it’s far superior to SMS. Apple made their own proprietary version in iMessage instead, so you have iPhones on iMessage and every other phone in the world on RCS.
It very much is a difference. If you’ve ever worked a corporate job, the relationship between devs and execs is exactly the same as a publisher and studio relationship. The devs did not want to release the game yet, nor do I think they wanted to support legacy consoles, but the shareholders forced that on them.
IIRC, CDPR had delayed it a number of times for just that reason, but were eventually pressured into releasing earlier than they wanted. On PC, there were some minor issues that were quickly patched, but none that negatively affected my playthrough.
A lot of the hate was undeserved, IMO. Besides one absolutely hilarious bug where I called my ride in an odd place, and another where part of a mission didn’t trigger so I had to reload the last Autosave which was about 30 seconds back, the game ran well for me and a lot of friends at launch. And CDPR responded quickly and had patches out within a week fixing most of the gameplay affecting bugs.
I typically judge games pretty harshly, and my only experience with CDPR prior was Witcher 3, which dropped with some bugs but was patched within a week, and really didn’t understand the level of shade CDPR received.
I’d wager you’re right, the lines to the right of the deltas flex with the uniform, so they may have used a metallic puff ink screen printed on.