Could Windows 8x be another Vista in the making?
Re opensource repositories you can set up global parameters to preserve backwards compatability. I used to maintain BSD repos and they took a full day to build with some cyclic dependency issues and some tricks to get tools that had obscure X11 library dependencies to build. Not for the faint hearted.
Switched to rpm based distros and never had any issues as long as you updated frequently and paid attention to the release notes.