The firmware flashing story for the drives is even funnier because some of the really common LG bluray drives that get used for ripping UHD blurays doesn't support reading UHD discs "on the box", but if you flash the firmware from a different drive it reads them without skipping a beat.

The 4K standard didn't bring any new disc formats to my knowledge. It just started using the higher layer count formats that were already available but the firmware on the cheaper drives wont read them.