The developers always can degrade the functionality; whether they can is not the point. The point is how long it takes them to, and how much they could be doing

The developers always can degrade the functionality; whether they can is not the point. The point is how long it takes them to, and how much they could be doing for other users with that time. Getting more experienced at making products that work on broken platforms is not a good thing. That is not good experience. That is a symptom of a broken industry and it makes your developers worse, not better. It's like people who say PHP isn't that bad, you just have to learn all of its quirks. Learning its quirks doesn't make you a better programmer, it makes you a programmer who is able to use a specific poorly-designed tool. That experience and knowledge is not portable and is not valuable outside of a specific arena, and is not the kind of experience and knowledge that developers should be working on. If your customers still use Palm Pilot, you've chosen the wrong market segment. Yes, make something people want, but you're allowed to be selective about who those people are. If you're a hacker, it's very likely because you enjoy creating and working on interesting and fun things. Making websites work in IE6 is not a fun thing. There is enough value waiting to be created that we don't have to waste our talents and energy on this kind of nonsense.