In reply to Phillip Hawley.

I've been doing this for 10 years, well before WordPress even had plugins, so it's definitely not "wishful thinking at it’s best or simply unsupported hyperbole." ;)

Who would I place the onus on? The plugin and theme developers themselves. The core WordPress developers are already doing their best to keep things backwards-compatible, they provide complete transparency during development with the ability to test a month before the release, and WordPress has a huge and helpful support community for any developer (and user) who has run into trouble.

The few core WordPress developers have done everything possible to ensure backwards-compatibility and to help the plugin and theme developers, short of testing all of the thousands of plugins and themes themselves (something which would undoubtedly drag WordPress development to a halt). It's up to the plugin and theme developers themselves to pickup the torch the rest of the way.

To be honest, I have yet to see a single WordPress upgrade in the 10 years I've been doing this where "everything breaks" necessitating "starting from scratch." If that ever happens to you again, head over to the WordPress Support Forums. We're a huge and helpful community, and we'll do our best to get you back up and running, all for free. :)