Is BD-J really more complex than HDi??

[Whyser]

I was in a forum arguing about which is the better HD format (of course I was fighting for Blu-Ray), and I said that come Oct 31, HD DVD will have no more advantage in terms of features.

Disc space, streaming rate, overall video/audio quality, interactive features, copy protection, disc durability, I told him that Blu-Ray either equals or excels HD DVD in all aspects, and that it basically boiled down to which studios you would want to see your movies on. The only advantage HD DVD has is Paramount/Dreamworks/Universal, and the cost of the player.

But the guy kept countering the interactive features, telling me that HDi is much easier to program for compared to BD-J, and gave me two links:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,136253/article.html
http://www.economist.com/science/dis...ory_id=9689600

From the first:
"BD-Java is a programming language. The benefit is that it's very flexible. The drawback is that you may need 100 lines of BD-Java code. HDi is a relatively compact piece of code; one command can cover quite a bit of interactivity.

BD-Java is also more complex, so the possibility of errors is greater. And when BD players are put out, [there's the question of whether] they all support the scenarios as coded up from the low level. [Some of the early problems with BD-Java discs] were in part due to the complexity that BD-Java brings. From our point of view, HDi offers all of the flexibility we need, in practice, and it does so in a more simplified way and in a way that we feel leads to better compatibility, better reliability, and lower costs. "

From the second:
"Engineers who’ve worked with both formats say Blu-ray is a pig to program. While extremely flexible, its programming language, BD-Java, requires lots of low-level code for even the simplest of instructions. The highly skilled programmers needed to do the job don’t exactly grow on trees. And because of the program’s complexity, even the best produce their share of bug-ridden software.

By comparison, writing software for HD DVD using Microsoft’s HDi interactive technology is a doddle—with one simple command doing the task of scores of lines of BD-Java. More importantly, HDi is the key to HD DVD’s better navigation around menus, and its instinctive ability to interact with the outside world."

So what I ended up telling him was that these problems were only temporary. Once programmers are able to get a set of libraries developed for BD-J, HDi's advantage for ease of programming should diminish.

But he retorted that since it requires skilled programmers to do BD-J, it's going to cost more for a studio to develop, therefore it would not be as economical for them and thus HD DVD is the superior format when it comes to interactive features + low cost of programming.

My question is, is BD-J really THAT difficult to develop for?