If the cost of frequent updates is breaking add ons that aren't actively maintained, I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. The majority of the slowness criticisms that ff receives seem to be caused by add ons.
It's not unreasonable to expect an add-on to work for more than six weeks, especially when there hasn't actually been any real, significant change in the base software. I'd bet the (unpaid) add-on authors are getting pretty tired of this as well -- they're the ones who have to deal with the emails from unhappy users.