Yeah, that's a bit backwards. Really, what happened is they broke backwards compatibility for device owners which is a much worse scenario: You couldn't upgrad

Yeah, that's a bit backwards. Really, what happened is they broke backwards compatibility for device owners which is a much worse scenario: You couldn't upgrade your device to the new OS! Why is this worse? It leads to a very immature platform with few avenues to improve upon it. At least iOS 7 makes it easy to still target 6, where the hard part is UI changes. Microsoft changed little in the UI between 7 and 8, but somehow the phones and tools remained incompatible.