In reply to Cavalary.

This seems to be cross-posted from the comments on make/core, so I figured I’d cross-post my reply as well.

The problem is that we don’t have the people power to continue to support all the currently supported versions (16!), and since we want the software to keep moving forward and improving, that number will continue to grow. If we don’t change the versions we support and reduce the load in that way, we still have to solve the problem in some other way.

A team of people hired by some person or company to handle backports for these older versions would be another potential way to solve the problem I suppose, but I can’t think of any person or company that would want to invest that kind of money into keeping up old versions of WordPress (that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but I can’t think of any).