I registered here just to confirm what the OP is saying. I discovered independently, by accident, that the Pioneer issue was fixed in this release (I was actually testing for something else!). I came across this site googling for the version and pioneer to see if I could find any release notes on it.
In all previous 10.x versions (including the previous 10.5) my computer would just hang on the Windows startup logo if my Pioneer DVD Writer was connected. It's now fixed and I can finally upgrade from 9.6!