I generally agree with you there. Permanent backwards compatibility has strong early rewards and strong late punishments.
I'd love to see programming languages and frameworks add a "gamma" phase to their initial releases. Alphas can be for the internal development, betas can be for stuff that's being tested for bugs and functionality on a public level, and gamma can be a state of "the code can be used out in production, but the API and functionality may change in the future once we see how the tool is used and can identify and resolve operational bottlenecks". Just a handy state that says "feel free to use this, but keep in mind that the interface will likely change for the better but in a non-backwards compatible way based on your experiences using it".
I'm pretty sick and tired of almost every project needing a version 2 because version 1 was essentially publicly released proof of concept that didn't know better.
I'd love to see programming languages and frameworks add a "gamma" phase to their initial releases. Alphas can be for the internal development, betas can be for stuff that's being tested for bugs and functionality on a public level, and gamma can be a state of "the code can be used out in production, but the API and functionality may change in the future once we see how the tool is used and can identify and resolve operational bottlenecks". Just a handy state that says "feel free to use this, but keep in mind that the interface will likely change for the better but in a non-backwards compatible way based on your experiences using it".
I'm pretty sick and tired of almost every project needing a version 2 because version 1 was essentially publicly released proof of concept that didn't know better.