@Otto -

To be fair, there was consideration for removing IE7 support entirely, but I think that got pushed back a release or two.

Q. Ok, but when IE7 wasn't dropped, who loaded up the 3.3 nightly to check to see if it worked before saying "hey, I think this is ready for Beta"?

A. No-one

Q. Ok, but when IE7 wasn't dropped, who loaded up test and release plan and made sure that all the boxes were tickets, such as to check to see if it worked before saying "hey, I think this is ready for Beta"?

A. No-one

Q. Ok, but when IE7 wasn't dropped, Who was the Product owner or Project Manager who put the line in the sand and said, hey it's ready for beta.

A. No-one

According to http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php and http://gs.statcounter.com/ IE7 still had a higher percentage of users than IE9 and Safari (all versions including iOS), yet no-one thought to even load the AdminUI to see if it worked???

You know guys like me, the folks who aren't well liked because we openly criticise 436 days of paid development time for a plug-in to not-quite replace bbPress, truly can accept UI changes we don't like. We know that there are going to be compromises to be made, especially in Open Source Software; we don't moan for the sake of it. But seriously, how do people expect us to "have faith" when no-one on the core/dev/automattic team can even be bothered to load their own software release in a browser with close to a 10% market share??

As I said on the thread that Jeffro references on WP.org, we're moving more and more people into the "edge case" category. Moving 10% of internet users into it simply because we thought about not supporting their browser but changed our mind, is a very very scary proposition.