Some unreliable predictions for 2015

The problem is that the software (app and library) authors don't do what everyone thinks they should (which _is_ technically impossible, because people have conflicting opinions about what they should do)

Let's talk about older, but well maintained versions of packages.

Who is doing that maintenance? In many cases, software developers only really support the current version of an application, they may support one or two versions back, but any more than that is really unusual.

It's usually the distro packagers/maintainers that do a lot of the work of maintaining the older versions that they ship. And the maintinance of the old versions has the same 'include all changes' vs 'only include what's needed (with the problem of defining what's needed)' issue that the distros have in what versions they ship in the first place.