Is it better to learn that it exists through surprise, by way of an engine upgrade suddenly changing the behavior of the software you wrote while in the bliss of your ignorance?
> Is it better to learn that it exists through surprise, by way of an engine upgrade suddenly changing the behavior of the software you wrote while in the bliss of your ignorance?
The premise of your question doesn't work. If one person is going to learn about the option and a second one isn't, the better system for that to occur in is the one in which more people end up with correct behavior.
In this case, that means surprising the guy with existing (buggy) software; he'll have to fix the bugs. It means not bothering the guy who's starting a greenfield project. Neither of them will be subject to this bug.
The alternative, which you seem to be saying you prefer, is that the guy with buggy software should continue to have bugs, and the greenfield guy should also have bugs.
Which is the worse surprise, when you update your dependency during development and get a fault, or when a user somehow ends up with a fault because of the previous default?
... than by surprise, when you find your integer column contains "[object Object]"? Jokes aside, breaking backwards compatibility is obviously a non-starter.
Developing with sqlite isn't quite like developing software that generically works against an ODBC or JDBC interface with minimal tweaking. You probably will want to peruse the documentation.