Hi, I'm sorry you've had a bad WordPress experience but I don't think your experience is typical - we try very hard to maintain backwards compatibility we don't

Hi, I'm sorry you've had a bad WordPress experience but I don't think your experience is typical - we try very hard to maintain backwards compatibility we don't deprecate randomly or rename thing unnecessarily IMHO. If you have specific examples of compatibility breaking changes we have made recently that caused you issues I would love to know about them so we can address them. I agreed that $page and $paged can be confusing - being able to both be on a page within a single item of content or on page X of the stream of blog items means we need two different variables - yes they could have better names but changing them would be backwards incompatible ;)