The backwards-compatibility is probably an institutional thing.

I've dealt with a Microsoft storage library for Java once that had an absolutely idiotic bug - you'd store a certain value, but would get something slightly different when retrieving it in 100% of cases [0]. I reported the bug and it was quickly fixed. But what amazed me was that the next version came out with a page long description [1] and analysis of the bug, its meaning for compatibility with other storage clients in different cases, the fix, and astonishingly a new flag you could enable if you want to keep retrieving screwed up values.

[0]: https://github.com/Azure/azure-storage-java/issues/30

[1]: https://github.com/Azure/azure-storage-java/wiki/Java,-Andro...