There are quite a few different transport function that can be called from hardware. I don’t think any of them was removed. However with cubase 8.5 there is a raise condition in transport make all of them more or less crap since then. But if can not send midi (or keyboard hid-events) it wont work without a lot of work. If you need a cheap transport shuttle express from contour is ok. It was more very good in cubase 8 until the raise bug was introduced.