Agreed, I'm absolutely stunned that they've done literally nothing to buffer their software slate for 2022. If they really had no plans to delay Starfield & RedFall until May, then their communication pipeline along upper management is 100% broken; they should have been able to communicate a delay for RedFall, especially one by half a full year, by February or March of this year at latest, given realistic developer expectations.
And, that should have given them enough time to try working something, ANYTHING, out for getting a couple big 3P releases in GamePass. Between that and more than a few 1P games being shown too early (Perfect Dark, Everwild, Fable etc.), the more it feels like MS was not prepared for this generation and if they hadn't purchased Zenimax, they'd have little to no AAA releases for the first three years for Xbox outside of more Halo and Forza (I guess Flight Sim counts but it's a year-old port from PC, and Pentiment & Grounded are simply not AAA games at all). That's completely inexcusable.
My gut tells me Sony likely locked down contracts for a lot of these major 3P releases, from Gotham Knights, Hogwarts, and Avatar to Street Fighter 6, Calistro Protocol & RE4 Remake, years ago, even before 2020 in some cases, and MS were likely too busy R&D'ing Xbox Series (IIRC there was a period where Xbox division had massive budget cuts, around 2016 & 2017. Maybe it was earlier; whenever they did that they probably also delayed work on their 9th-gen systems if they were considering shutting Xbox down altogether) and picking up teams like Ninja Theory, to really try signing similar exclusivity and marketing deals with 3Ps. It's not like they'd of have the branding power or budget allocations to do such, anyway.
As for the Sega stuff, well at one point Sega literally proposed the OG Xbox be a Dreamcast 2, with full native DC BC, but it was MS who shut them down. Probably from the enterprise side. That was a missed opportunity; an OG Xbox with DC BC, being led by Ed Fries, Seamus Blackley, Peter Moore, even Bernie Stolar (he might've helped bury Saturn in America but he also helped the Dreamcast have a very successful USA launch after SOJ botched it in 1998), with MS money backing them, would've been quite big. Bigger than what the OG Xbox managed sales-wise, tho still very far away from PS2.
Still though, it probably could've done well enough to where MS could've held off on 360 for a year, avoided the RROD catastrophe, and maybe plan out some parts of the 360's setup better (built-in wifi, built-in native HD-DVD support, non-proprietary HDD). That maybe would've increased the MSRP by some, but the later release would've made sure it wasn't by too much. This would've helped out PS3 to a degree, but still hurt it because it's still the same easier-to-program-for 360, same fully-unified RAM, still a bit cheaper (maybe $499 for the top model instead of $399) too.
Even if that would've resulted in a 360 that sold a bit less (say, 75 million LTD vs. 90 million LTD for PS3), it would've gone a long way towards ensuring a stronger core gaming focus in the twilight years, and maybe would've helped prevent the bad design choices of the XBO.
You present a possibility for a very interesting alternate timeline tbh. What if Microsoft simply doubled-down on PC gaming instead of trying to get into the console gaming space? I think we'd of eventually gotten Steam Machines from Microsoft, but actually supported fully, and a Steam-like counterpart from them rather than Valve. I think that could've been very successful for them tbh.
Similarly I have thoughts here and there of what if Sega doubled-down on arcades in the mid '90s and released a comprehensive Neptune (with CD-ROM support built-in) instead of the Saturn, and essentially focused on Neptune as their main, lower-end 32-bit entry from '94 - '98 while doing select ports to systems like the PS1 a year or two after the Neptune? Maybe they could've helped save arcades from fading away and built up a bigger console gaming audience even earlier.
Actually, VF5 came out first for the 360. I remember because the first gameplay vids for VF5 I scoped from Gamespot were the 360 version, and there was a big deal back then because the 360 release was the only one with online play. It took a few years for the PS3 port to get online enabled play (and for the graphics to get patched up to look as good as the 360 version).
But the (at the time) final version, Final Tuned I believe, PS3 was the only system that got that version of VF5. It was definitive console port for a while until Ultimate Showdown last year for the PS4. That all said, I think VF's fanbase post-Saturn/Dreamcase, console-wise, was always PlayStation. VF4, 'nuff said. VF5, vast majority of console fanbase was on PS3 since VF itself was always an IP much more popular in Japan/Asian than the West (VF4 helped to start change that, but VF5 regressed some of that progress), so most of that audience was on PS3. I wouldn't be surprised if VF6 is PS5 console-exclusive, or if that version is the lead platform with marketing rights to it.