It's even worse. Buying bleeding edge phone today will bring you less features than before. No headphone jack, need to use dongles, no home button and very convenient finger print reader for authentication, awkward gestures instead of user friendly and self explanatory button click, shorted battery life and the list goes on and on. Lack of those features will never be equalled with mostly useless new features like portrait mode or sliminess. I understand that I as a customer, supposedly, don't know what ,currently, non existing feature I will want but I think I know exactly what features I don't want to loose.

Exactly. Basically the same thing that happened in consumer desktop/laptop computers 8-10 years ago. People are now keeping them for 5-10 years instead of upgrading every 3 years.

Good point. I'd guess that if modern phones had replaceable batteries the upgrade cycle would be even longer.