Nym wrote:and all i'm saying is that it's unfortunately not that simple.
in the real world os2xl would never have happened if 100% compatibility was maintained. the amount of work would have been monstrous.
I have to agree, we're not talking about computers that have their virtually "unlimited" resources compared to the MPC. How many GBs worth of OS exist in Windows XP/Vista alone just for backwards compatibility? We've known on the MPC that OS space is a commodity and JJ has always been right at the limit of what can possibly be squeezed in there before the MPC can't hold any more.
At least in the MPC space if we want forward progress we're going to have to accept that we're going to need to sacrifice some things and especially backwards compatibility. We can at least hope that between Major OS updates things will stay compatible.
I'm sure there is a group of people who need feature X in a given OS and they chose to stick to the previous OS or they end up working with the new one and figuring out how to do X given what they have. Yeah, it requires blood sweat and tears to figure out the work arounds or to port over existing projects... but on the plus side if you really don't want to port over an existing project you can at least go back to an older OS. I could understand the frustration more if it was undocumented that it was a one way upgrade. The missing features/issues are pretty well documented in the forums at this point and nobody is being forced to upgrade.