Hacker News Reader

Personally I find not keeping things around just for legacy reasons a feature.

As long as they signal deprecation with enough notice (which they are very good about) then it shouldn't be any real issue.

Having to refactor a lot of code to keep up with the changes, even if given enought notice, is a real issue. Developers' time costs a lot of money.

So does maintaining legacy code and API's but spread across the whole community.

It's annoying on a small scale, and I've been there myself (many times) so I'm sympathetic, but it's also a greater good overall.