In reply to Mike Schinkel.

I mean, your idea basically amounts to sabotaging WordPress without really accomplishing the goal of inducing users to upgrade. It should be no surprise that people who are invested in WordPress aren't going to react well to that suggestion. You get a disrespectful reply because the suggestion to make WordPress intentionally slow is disrespectful to its users.

There are dozens of ideas on how to push hosts to upgrade their versions of WordPress, the bluntest of which is to just make PHP5.3 the minimum version (which I honestly support). I'm sure you can think of other, decent suggestions yourself. But pulling out a bad idea, and then being annoyed that people call it out for being a bad idea, then getting mad that people call you out is far more childish than any of the responses I've seen in this thread.