Boiling down to a 24 hour check in is a bit hyperbolic. LIcesning in video games have never been more than a single use case. You can get around that through some loop holes to do stuff like game sharing one copy of a game but that doesnt even exist on Steam. Trying to equte something like a windows license to a copy of Halo 5 is not the same thing.
Steam introduced an offline mode i believe in 2013 but to this day its very finicky. Its a better use but it also didnt and doesnt have the ability to ever trade games in the way Microsoft was planning to.
I say there were too early because people hadnt adjusted to buying digital as they are accustomed to it now. Microsoft was going to give you the ability to share disc games digitally. Along with keeping the ability to trade the game in at a retailer. Thats unheard of to this day.
I wasn't boiling it down to 24 h check-in. I was saying that was the cause that lead to the backlash. Not the other ideas that Microsoft was considering - ideas that they didn't really talk about until after they had already backed off of their plans. My point was, what Microsoft proposed didn't fail because consumers weren't ready, it failed due to how Microsoft chose to introduce it. It's sooo easy to forget now but people had many questions on how things would work and there were no answers from Microsoft. No timely answers anyway and they chose to stay quiet as if they were thinking of what/how to address the situation they found themselves in. It all seemed reactive. They just weren't ready.
If they were organized and really ready to introduce all the features they were talking about (it is easy to talk about it vs actually doing it), they could have been the ones to lead people to "getting" adjusted to buying digital. They chose the opposite route and pretty much gave up on it. They did not actually try to understand why people were opposing the digital future they were trying to guide people towards.
In conclusion, it's not that people weren't ready, it's more that Microsoft wasn't ready. That is where they failed and the 24h check wasn't required for them to be able to implement the ideas that you are trying to call 'radical'.
As for licensing, I was simply pointing out that there were blueprints for Microsoft to follow in how they handled game licensing. They could have been the ones to lead or influence how game licensing is done going forward by limiting our digital games on a device basis or number of activations - making sure to leave us in control of what is activated and where. For game sharing, they could have provided us with a pass that we could share with our friends so they could try select games that we owned. If they had focused their efforts on verifying content we share vs verifying content that we own, they would have made more progress in convincing people that digital is ready for them.
I’m only about 1 hour in but I’m blown away right now 
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