There is some truth to that, but there are options besides maintaining backwards compatibility to a huge extent in your products. As long as you boldly and loudly proclaim how it is being broken, there is nothing wrong with saying if you can't accept that don't upgrade. Or more recently, telling people to run that particular program in a virtual environment.

I primarily use windows, but I have a virtual machine with Linux specifically to run Sage. I know its not the same, but it is a very similar concept.