[26fingies]

OTOH you, as a library supplier, may be somewhat hamstrung to improve things you think ought to be improved but consider the productivity hit to your downstream consumers if you constantly break things for them. Stepping back to consider all parties, for even moderately popular projects the balance is obviously tipped in the favor of the consumers.

There are libraries out there (such as FFMpeg iirc) that will do a yearly major version with breaking changes. This is a good approach imo. FFmpeg consumers know what to expect and when to expect it.