"100% agree we'd all be ahead if 20+ years ago Lionel and MTH just adopted the DCC standard every other scale uses. But 3 rail has to be special."
Some history for you young folks. When TMCC was developed in the early to mid-1990s there was no DCC equipment on the market that could handle 5-10 amperes of current and it was hellaciously expensive. You needed multiple boosters to supply a layout because power and command signal are integrated with DCC. Not so with TMCC, which functioned independent of the power supplies and thus was much more cost effective and well suited to high current AC open frame motors as well as modern can motors. Neil Young and the team developing TMCC wanted to make sure they could adapt 100 years of Lionel locos and their ancient technology to more modern command control. Sure enough, at least two companies (Ed Bender's Train Brain and Bob Krivacic's Engineer on Board (EOB) marketed by Mike Reagan's Train America Studios) sold and installed aftermarket TMCC command modules for existing non-command locos. A great success story.
At that time 1996-1999, Mike Wolf was dismissive of command control and said unflattering things about Lionel and TMCC. Take my word for it or search the web. Then he started losing sales and started developing PS2 and DCS, the latter of which arrived in 2002, the former in 2000. At that point, MTH apparently chose not to license TMCC, so it was MTH's call not to use TMCC, not Lionel's as far as is publicly known and they had many reasons for not doing so. For much of the decade 1996-2006 MTH and Lionel were engaged in what might have been a life or death corporate struggle. No one won. Lionel, for various reasons, probably mostly selfish, licensed TMCC, but not the later Legacy system. Atlas, K-Line, Weaver and 3rd Rail all chose to license TMCC in about 2002 or slightly later.
That's why and how we don't have DCC as the standard in 3 rail O gauge, not because of a conspiracy on the part of Lionel and MTH to annoy us 
. Firstly there were substantial technical and cost obstacles, and then there was intense corporate competition that made it unlikely that the two major players (Lionel and MTH) were going to co-operate in any way, shape or form.
