J.River on SB/transporter-sustainable post-LMS

So, like many, I love the Sb hardware-I own a Transporter, SB Classic, and SB Radio, love them all. However, I have never liked LMS. It is clunky, the playlist function is awful. Now, it is unsupported, will soon lose MOG and has no relationship with Beats.

I have always preferred J. River, but did not like the plug-in in that allowed use of J. River with LMS.

So, given the impending obsolescence of LMS, I started looking for alternatives and was considering selling my SB boxes. Before I spent any money on alternative hardware, I downloaded the latest J. River and started playing around with it. Much to my surprise, it saw all 3 of my sb boxes (when i previously used JRiver 17, it did not do this). It gave me the option of using J.River to control LMS (from my NAS) , but I declined and decided to play music from a backup drive (not expecting this to work). I do not have LMS on my MAC. Even more to my surprise, i was able to use J.River to control my sb devices. I was able to play J.River playlists, J.River accessed internet radio, etc.Now playing info showed up on the screens.

WOW.

So, I am wondering how/why JRiver can control the sb devices? Does this mean that I can still use my boxes even after LMS/mysqueezebox.com really become obsolete.

I am very excited by this discovery but keep thinking that I must be missing something?????