[r00fus]

There is one very important stakeholder you are ignoring in your analysis - the end user. Apple creates stuff not for devs or themselves, but for the real customers - who are the users of their devices and comptuers.

In the case of paid upgrades, if it pains customers and leads to lower device sales, then Apple will come up with a solution to it. Developers (and Apple's internal team as well) come in at a distant second place.

[seanalltogether]

The product teams absolutely should be focusing on the end user. However, the platform and framework teams should be supporting the features/tools for all devs. My criticism of the platforms that Apple pushes is that they seem to focus more on the specific needs of their internal teams than the broader needs of all the other devs that will be helping to grow the platform.

The line I occasionally hear in the apple dev community is "you can't change x/y/z on that component, you need to rebuild it from scratch", which time and again shows a very narrow focus in their tooling.

[JohnQPasserby]

I have run into those kinds of problems, and it doesn't seem to be a huge burden to make a new component. My complaint is that Xcode is a POS but I have to use it.