John Z., formerly of Lionel worked with a few of us as Beta testers to work on the DCC compatibility back in the day. Rusty and I were both helping out as I recall. John even shipped me a unit that allowed flashing the software as updates were released. I still have it.
Having said that, I’m going to do what Bruk did... order an RCDR board from the legacy berk and install it on my Challenger. Although everything I own will be DCC compatible at that point I’ve really come to prefer Legacy over DCC. I just need Lionel to make a bunch of new Legacy diesels and I’ll just stick with Legacy :-)