[masklinn]

> This trend of overengineering

I'd dispute it being over-engineering: media keys tend to control a mix of hardware and software (OS) features (looking at asus keyboards on the internet I see audio volume, mic mute, fan speed / perf governor, display off, brightness, projection mode, touchpad off, sleep, and airplane mode).

Given this, an OS driver is a requirement, and the OS further needs to access the hardware for obvious reasons.

This means you can either implement everything uniformly in driver (just bouncing from the interrupt to a hardware operation in the case of hardware features), or you can mix the implementation between firmware and driver.

Unless you have a very good justification to do so (which I'd very much dispute the existence of for gaming-oriented ASUS laptops) the latter seems like the over-engineering.