I never wrote or participated in the comunity (at least the English, being Italian) of Terraria, and personally does not affect me not too because I play on PC, but I have an xbox 360 on which my brother along with his cousin play Terraria.
I was wondering when it would arrive the 1.3 upgrade of 360, and now I find out that will never come because this will be the last update for these consoles ....
The biggest problem is the reason you gave.
""and we are running into hardware requirement issues... as Terraria has grown over the years , its hardware demands have as well - with 1.3 being a sizeable jumping - off point""
I have a very old computer, with that many games in pixels lags, to play many games I resort to the xbox 360 which will be old too, but things like GTA V work.
You want me to believe that such a console can not hold a game in pixels as Terraria!?!?
I mean some programming and I know that it is not just the graphics that weighs on a game, but unless it was programmed crap, whatever console should turn Terraria, and indeed my very old computer succeeds.
So it's a bad excuse .... because if it is true that you can not run it, I wonder where you learned to program ....
If you really wanted to stop supporting these consoles, at least this last update you could do it, the moon Lord acts as real final boss of Terraria, is all that adds version 1.3 makes it much more interesting to play than in version 1.2.4
It could at least conclude with the 1.3 so, however, does not matter, if you say that consoles like that fail to make it work fine ...
Excuse me for English and anger, but when things seem too stupid to be true I must speak my mind ...