I look at it this way. RTI discovered a problem after they had settled on the manufacturing process of the RP6 and they fixed it by making and supplying these pigtails. They are hokey but they make the thing work correctly and, in the words of an old radio amateur I once knew, they fulfill the commandment "Tune for Minimum Smoke."

Compare URC, who received one product, I can't remember which, where engineering forgot to plug a competitor's IR emitter into it, so they never noticed that the offshore manufacturer had used 2.5 mm jacks instead of 3.5 mm jacks. URC people told me at a training that it was a mistake. I noted at the time that the solution would have been to make pigtails that adapt from 2.5 mm to 3.5 mm. Their solution was to do nothing. I don't know if they even put a warning in the box. I DO know that I've read installers here complain that they were on a job site and found that their other emitters wouldn't fit in the URC piece.

So I'm happy to just use the pigtails. Perhaps the XP8 is being delayed because they had a similar SNAFU and instead of enduring complaints about pigtails, they decided to just take the amount of time needed to get the XP8 right. I started that rumor right here and now and it's not true, but the pigtails are a good thing. Use 'em every time.