To be fair, the only versions higher than 2.01 listed on that page are 2.50 (which adds the ability to store all metadata on a separate partition... not that us

To be fair, the only versions higher than 2.01 listed on that page are 2.50 (which adds the ability to store all metadata on a separate partition... not that useful) and 2.60 (which adds support for "partial overwrites" on sequentially-recorded media). Neither of those seem terribly useful for the "UDF filesystem on a shared hard-disk partition" use-case we're talking about, so I don't think Linux's limit of UDF 2.01 is very important in practice.