[johnklos]

You're generalizing, and doing so with poor assumptions. Supporting old hardware isn't about cost. If one wanted to compare the cost of simply maintaining code with the cost of adding features, supporting new hardware, and so on, it'd be hard to even measure maintenance.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation should be running two Pis of every kind with the newest version of their official OS and the next older one, running automated tests. This isn't hard, nor is it time consuming after it's set up.

The real issue is that people change things in ways that affect older hardware, which is fine, but they should test those changes. If they don't want to, they shouldn't be making those changes. Period.