Choosing between portability and innovation

How badly have end users been affected by those ABI changes? They either have core binary release with OS, or the ports system to compile non-core packages. Most Linux end users seem to think they need freshly compiled source for their latest distro, and repos make this convenient. 3rd party generic software releases often breaks due to differences between distros.

The lack of kernel driver ABI for evil proprietary modules, probably has pained Linux end users more, than small clean ups to system call & libc intefaces would; after all the complaint is that only POSIX features get used.