BC is a problem only if they get it sticking to very old generation PowerPC CPUs, POWER architecture is very scalable, and with an APU made of a scaled-down POWER 8 CPU plus a GPU comparable to the competition they could both get BC and easily outperform the mid-range x86 solutions (they are mid-high end considering APUs only, but mid or mid-low-end compared to the whole offer of x86 CPUs and AMD or NVIdia GPUs) used by MS and Sony. Porting to POWER based architecture isn't a big problem, first because since the last gen consoles too started using a higher degree of hardware abstraction, getting their performance advantage compared to a PC of the same power thanks to HAL, drivers, libraries and OS optimizations for a single HW configuration and not letting devs anymore using low-level tricks in the application layer, second because neither data and address alignment is a problem, as it was instead in very old times porting between x86 and 680x0, as POWER can use both little and big endian.

Wanting to be innovative to grab the interest of the 'blue ocean' do come with risks and not catering to the core gaming market is why this console has failed.

Console gaming is slowly shrinking (debatable to some, but I think this is the case) and casuals are switching to their phones, so consoles should appeal to console gamers, which the Wii U did not completely do