People are being unreasonable.

It's free software and it's the best there is. Even a commercial software package that you'd pay 100's of dollars for would be worse in the compatibility dimension that the poster is lamenting.

It's actually much worse. I use SolidWorks (parametric 3D solid modeler for mechanical design) and my company pays around $4k per seat, and it requires you to use a specific SolidWorks-certified GPU driver, which means you are forever stuck with whatever bugs that version has. It's an awful situation. My last laptop (Dell Precision M4800) had graphics issues with docking and undocking and sleeping and waking, but I couldn't update the GPU driver because it would break solidworks. Fun!

How much does 3d Studio max cost? I haven't used it since the 90s so even the name might have changed. I thought it was thousands.

Last I checked its 1500 a seat... a year.

They bumped the OpenGL version up to 3.4 (or something) which means older hardware can't run it anymore--one of the main reasons I had to give up my Junior Woodchuck Blender Hacker hobby since I can't afford new hardware...

They bumped the OpenGL version to 3.3 which is 9 years old. I don't know exactly what hardware you have but there's some that supports newer GL versions on Linux vs Windows, i.e the integrated GPU in Sandy Bridge hardware only goes up to 3.1 in the Windows driver but the Linux driver supports 3.3. AMD Linux drivers support 3.3 all the way back to HD2000 hardware from 2007.

I know it sucks, but at least it sounds better than giving up an entire hobby: Couldn't you just stay on the last working version of Blender?

Not if I wanted any patches accepted ;)