> They appear, to me, to be acting from a place of fear and conservatism rather than innovation.

Bingo. Here's a fun exercise: try to find the last genuinely useful feature added to the Maps API in the release notes.

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...

To give you a taste, here's the largest change made in 3.42:

> InfoWindows now have a default max width of 648px which can be overridden by setting the InfoWindow maxWidth property. The width of an InfoWindow can now exceed 648px but will still be limited by the width of the map. (Previously, Infowindows were always restricted to the lesser of 648px or the map width.)

Also note that the minor version (0.x) is incremented quarterly, and we're up to 3.43 now, so over 10 years.