CounterStrike uses the Half-life engine, which is based on the Quake 2 Engine, and thus probably uses OpenGL or the Quake2 software renderer (it works on the FireGL card, which seems to suggest that it is not using DirectX, since there are no DirectX drivers for said card).
Blah blah blah. I wouldn't have said Counter Strike if it didn't know it came with a DirectX renderer (it comes with DX, GL and software), would I?
Sure it's an issue, but hardly a massive failure rate by anyones measuring stick, and nowhere near the 50% that everyone keeps attributing to "someone I know". At most it's a marginal inconvenience.
"Someone I know" is Puppy Games (http://www.puppygames.net) and they get a 65% success rate for OpenGL on Windows. 35% *is* a massive failure rate. Totally unacceptable.
Ofcourse I know that Mark is the über coder, and no-one but him writes flawless code, so no-one is going to actually buy said 3rd party module because "waiting for an official BRL module" somehow seems like the more sensible choice.
Using third party libs before they've been proven is a dangerous game. Mark has the Blitz3D engine, which presumably a DirectX module would be based on, which *is* a proven stable and compatible engine.
Another proven engine is the Popcap game framework. That is a real possibility.
Anyway BRL will eventually run out of stuff to do some time after Maplet2 (as far as I can tell), and by then, if the demand (and thus expected sales) is great enough to justify the cost of development, I'm sure BRL will do that next. After all BRL is a business, and there's no place for religion when you're making money.
Where does religion come into it? This *is* about business.