> In the meantime, the simpler version of the software is long gone

The thing is that with free software the old software is almost never really long gone. It's still out there, free for your perusal. That is the beauty of free software, it's always additive process. But it does also put responsibility on the user to pick the patches they want, either themselves or by proxy. Ultimately you are responsible for the free code you are running, not some vague upstream dominated by fnaag et al.