My team has been speculating about this too (and a large part of it wanted to make a bad decision to use IR this year based on this quote). I can't imagine how it could possibly become mandatory next year. Even for very important elements of the game, there are always multiple ways to go about it, it defenitley is not in the spirit to make IR a neccessity. I think they may have just wanted to encourage more people to use it.
IR as a whole seems to have went pretty badly because of all sorts of interference people were reporting. After this showing, one wonders if IR will be back at all. I think they should spend money on some other interesting sensor system (hmmm, cant really think of anything practical right now, but im sure they can
) unless they can improve IR significantly.