Frequent updates

> Keep in mind that the question here is not how much breakage happens. That happens at its own pace regardless of version number. The question is what the experience is of having the breakage happen to you. If there are three breaking changes that affect you happening in the span of five years, again, it's intuitively appealing to say that you want to be disrupted once instead of three times. But actually dealing with all three changes at once is much more difficult.

You forget that not everyone has the luxury of upgrading everything they have deployed in lock-step. Especially given that every [sub-[sub-[sub-]]]component they depend on has its own independent lifecycle.

...Case in point being setuptools iterating about 5x faster than actual python releases, and 10-25x faster than most deployment environments [1]. But more anecdotally, the lion's share of my time at $dayjob-1 was spent constantly cleaning up the messes from the impedence mismath between some rapidly-iterating bleeding-edge dependencies, others provided by EDA tool vendors [2], and everything in between.

[1] ie LTS/EL platforms with 2+ year release cadences and ~5yr standard support lifecycles
[2] More accurately, python code _generated_ by said EDA tools.