[kbenson]

> more churn than Windows -- which never subscribed to a tradition.

My understanding is that Windows has always had a very strong tradition of backwards compatibility. Even to the point of making prior bugs that vendors rely on still function the same way for them (i.e. detect if it's e.g. Photoshop requesting buggy API, serve them the buggy code path and everyone else the fixed one).

That's just as much a tradition as "we should implement this with file semantics because that's traditionally how our OS has exposed functionality".