You mileage may vary in your desire to see your tools evolve, but I much prefer radical evolution, otherwise we'd still be cutting film on slightly upgraded Steenbecks and Moviolas.
Letting people buy LR makes them feel comfortable about never losing access to their own raw material. The savvy approach is to let them have this much, charge them to do interesting things with it, and let them keep the final output in a place that remains entirely theirs.
As of 10.1 I don't think anybody thinks it's any kind of bad program anymore.
Initially it was mostly people not understanding that a "rewrite from scratch" is inevitably going to lose some of their features, but will provide a better foundation for future stuff. Plus, some professional users think that the rules of software development don't apply to them, and that some features they used in 2002 should continue to exist in 2014, because "we're pro". And Apple discontinuing fcp 7 prematurely didn't help with that either.