Not backwards compatible with PSVR version 1 games? I’m having a hard time imagining a good reason for this. They claim it’s because it’s a totally new VR experience… whatever that means.
But at least some devs have confirmed their psvr games will be patched to support the new version, like No Man’s Sky.
Their support of that game has been very impressive over the years. Launch was rocky, sure, but they recovered and kept pushing ahead.
As for the software abstraction being poor, that’s also just bad engineering on Sony’s part then.
Whether or not this is all abstracted away, I have no idea... but there really is a pretty huge difference between 1 and 2 if you think about the camera set up and the controller situation. The move controllers were optional - they didn't even come with the system. I think there were bundles that had them. They came out BEFORE the VR system did, and were kind of a gimmick until the PSVR landed.
Now that you have a real high quality headset, that ships with standard, hopefully high quality controllers, the target application should take advantage of those things.