I think there are two main issues which are affecting the success of so-called 'apodizing' reconstruction filters. One issue has been the confusion over what, exactly, defines an apodizing filter. As I recall, Peter Craven, who proposed this filter in an AES paper, defined apodizing as a minimum-phase reconstruction filter that featured a stop-band frequency that not only fully rejects the ultrasonic alias image band (of which, the ubiquitous half-band reconstruction filters do not fully), but also rejects the upper band edge of the original ADC used to for recording. To my thinking, that latter part was the innovative part of what Craven proposed, not so much the use of minimum-phase filters, which, while pretty much ignored for digital audio up to then, were also quite well known to DSP in general. In addition, I find the the name apodizing less than an accurate description. The name itself (which loosely means, 'to remove a foot') actually speaks to what's called filter 'windowing'. Such windowing is about lessening the abrupt transition effects of having a finite length filter kernel, when sampling theory calls for an infinitely long filter kernel.
The other main issue affecting the wide adoption of apodizing, IMHO, is that it's founded on an unproven assumption. Which is that linear phase digital filter 'pre-ringing' is responsible for the negative subjective response many of we audiophiles have to 'the sound' of digital audio. Therefore, the use of a minimum-phase reconstruction filter would eliminate such pre-ringing at the playback end of the chain (by greatly increasing the post-ringing, it should be pointed out). However, the pre-ringing stemming from the ADC linear-phase brickwall anti-alias filter is already encoded on the CD. Can anything be done about it? Craven realized that this too could be removed if the playback filter stop-band was lowered enough to fully reject the Nyquist frequency, perhaps just a little bit below even that. Down to around 21.5KHz, or so.
The minimum-phase filters provided within DAC chips appear to meet the first half of what Craven proposed, which is the elimination of pre-ringing by the reconstruction filter, but not the other half, which is the elimination of pre-ringing encoded within the music by the ADC's linear-phase anti-alias via inclusion of the Nyquist frequency within the filter's stop-band. In either case, this elimination strategy is based on the assumption that pre-ringing is bad for the sound, which, while it may seem to make some intuitive sense, I don't believe has yet been proven correct.
